Continuing the look at Filmart, the industry fair wrapped up yesterday in Hong Kong. The Hollywood Reporter (PDF) has a few items:
- Phranakorn Films sold all rights in Taiwan and Hong Kong for Meat Grinder to Taiwan's Deep Joy Entertainment. Despite what Logboy says about censorship, I still have to wonder if a "director's cut" of Meat Grinder might be marketed internationally.
- Thailand's GMM International bought the rights to a package of 11 horror titles from Indonesia's Rapi Films. I bet they'll dub them in Thai and send them straight to video.
- Thailand's Right Beyond sold TV and video rights for Diamond Eye and Mr. Tim Muay Thai Fighter to Hungary's Paradigma Film as well as video rights for King Cobra and Black Panther to NSR of Malaysia. Those are all direct-to-video titles from Right Beyond.
And the day three edition of The Hollywood Reporter Fair Daily (PDF) had Elizabeth Kerr's review of last year's horror-crime-procedural Soul's Code (ถอดรหัสวิญญาณ or Thod Rahat Winyan). Here's the intro:
If you took the Thai horror hit Shutter and mated it with CSI, the product might be something like Soul’s Code. And what an ugly child it would be. Even taking into consideration the suspension of disbelief demanded of the genre, director Adsajun Sattagovit’s Code can't make a case for itself as either a procedural thriller or as a horror pic, lacking as it is in both thrills and frights.
And it gets better and better. Oddly, a scathing review like that makes me want to watch Soul's Code, and I actually have the DVD at home but I haven't worked up the courage to bring it down off the shelf and put it in the player.
The idea of an uncut "international" version is certainly interesting. I can even see why it might be possible...
ReplyDeleteI'm always reading how Thailand wants to be a player in world cinema and to grab a share of that lucrative overseas market, so it would actually make sense some sense for them to allow such versions to be marketed as long as they are region coded differently from those in Thailand itself. Such versions would be very attractive for certain small DVD companies especially for films like "Meat Grinder" catering to that audience for such "extreme" horror films. Will it happen? Probably not....
Unfortunately even the Thai censors know exactly how foolishly worthless region coding has become these days and would never want to release any version of a film they would have to expect to get seen in Thailand eventually.
For me... an outsider... it just seems that the almost idiotic fear they have of certain ideas and images and the draconian approach they take to "protect" people makes Thailand look worse to me than anything they could ever censor out of a film ever could.
It's a good film, blending thriller and horror. It also bears a strong resemblance to the X-Files. You know, Scully and Moulder.
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