If there's one thing I learned from watchingArt of the Devil(2004), it's that you should always tip your Barber as generously as possible. That's because barbers may secretly perform black magic—you know, THE ART OF THE DEVIL!—and they can wreak all kinds of bloody, bloody havoc, simply by lighting lots of candles, waving homemade arts and crafts in the air, and reciting incantations convincingly. They also sometimes make use of corpses and eels, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
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It is one such barber who is patronized by Boom (played by model-turned-actress Supaksorn Chaimongkol). She doesn't repeatedly visit his shop to get a haircut or anything remotely related to grooming. Instead, she goes to the back of the store, climbs the stairs, and enters a poorly-lit private room. She wants some of that black magic! After handing him some money and giving him her requests, he gets down to the dirty work of making everyone on her hit list hallucinate and/or cough up blood and/or and die.
Boom herself is a victim. Her affair with a married architect ends badly—really badly—after he treats their relationship with indifference, smacks her in the face, and then gets three of his friends to sexually assault her on a deserted beach. This all sends Boom over the edge and straight to the barber in order to seek revenge via witchcraft, not only on the architect and his disgusting friends but also on his current wife and kids, his ex-wife and kids, and a grounded reporter who begins to suspect that the accumulating deaths are not of this world but rather THE ART OF THE DEVIL!
Although there's a memorable scene that involves a roomful of blood-soaked eels (magically created by the barber via a ritual using the aforementioned corpse and eels) and an interesting narrative structure that plays with timeline, the film is, unfortunately, glacially paced, unsurprising, and dull. And for a horror Movie, it's nowhere near as scary as me lying in my bed at night and screaming THE ART OF THE DEVIL! into the darkness.
Thai Movie Central Rating
How to Watch the Full Movie (with Thai Audio and English Subtitles)
—Buy the DVD (Region 1).
—Watch on Amazon (rent/buy for US$2.99 & up).
—Watch on iTunes (rent/buy for US$3.99 & up).
—Also available to watch for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Additional Notes
—
Art of the Devilwas directed by Tanit Jitnukul, better known for his hit historical epic,Bang Rajan(2000).
—The movie spawned two narratively unrelated sequels,Art of the Devil 2
(2005) andArt of the Devil 3(2008).
—The Thai title of this movie is คนเล่นของ (transliteration: "khon len khong"), which literally means "people who play with things."
—Movie images and video © Five Star Production Co. Ltd. and Tiger Team.
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