jangan pandang belakang

malaysian movies! it's been quite a while since i've seen one. the last malaysian movie i saw is man laksa. and it sucked. hard. but i'm not going to talk about that horrible disgrace to malaysian film industry today. i'm going to talk about the latest horror film from ahmad idham: jangan pandang belakang. now this is one of the few malaysian films that doesn't suck.

so i happened to be a horror film fan. especially japanese horror. so i just can't help but to compare this movie to other japanezy horror films like the ring, ju-on etc. there is no doubt that some of the ghostly encounters in the film felt like a typical japanese horror film; but they do feel very malaysian and different. there are also some scenes that was actually funnier than scary because it was quite ridiculous like the scenes of the flying ghost on top of the main character's car; and the scene where the ghost side-stepped in front of a door opening just to show the audience her/his/it's hands.

anyways, what i like about this film, better than japanese film is the finely tuned pacing. there was never a boring scene in the movie. plus, there were some really GOOD on-you-face shocking moments shuffled through the whole film to keep audiences at the edge of their seats all times.

the storyline is quite the typical exorcism horror film type. dude gets messed up by evil spirits. dude gets help. his ordeal was scary but the end he got saved. pretty basic stuff really. i just wished that the director would put more time and effort in building the main character's personalities so that the audience would be more attached to him.

this is definitely not the typical boring malaysian movie, but it has nothing special to offer to the already crowded film industry. i just hope it would contribute something good to the malaysian movie industry in any form. like how well the pacing of the film is and how well the creative use of sound effects of a high pitched screaming of a crazy women were used to scare the shit out of the audiences. and oh, the ghost looks scary enough.

just watch this film with a friend or two. i don't think i would be able to watch this alone. and i ALWAYS watch horror films alone........ so that means that this film is QUITE scary. for that, this is what i think about the film: 7.0/10.0