Darah (2009)0

Type: Feature film Genre: Horror, slasher Release date: Oct 8 Perhaps I shouldn’t be in an utterly apa­thetic mood when writ­ing a review, but after over nine thou­sand years of dawdling on what to say about Darah, I decided that there’s not a whole lot, really. I attended a spe­cial advance director’s cut screen­ing at Ngee Ann’s movie the­atre about two weeks before it was due to open in Singaporean cin­e­mas. Darah is an Indonesian and Singaporean co-production, as well as the first film pro­duced by Gorylah Pictures, a new pro­duc­tion com­pany. The pro­ducer Gary Goh was there to talk about the mak­ing of the film. A lot of it was about bud­get and mar­ket­ing and the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stuff that only manly film­mak­ers like myself would be inter­ested in, but he did men­tion that Darah is essen­tially a feature-length remake of a short film that the pro­duc­ers spot­ted. The movie was com­pleted in a fairly short time, and meant to put the pro­duc­tion com­pany on the map and grab some num­bers. Therefore, don’t expect any­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary about this film. I over­heard the over­all plot sum­mary before the show even began: A bunch of friends finds a young girl stranded on the road. They send her home, but she per­suades them to stay for din­ner. Not long after, the house’s inhab­i­tants break out the chain­saw, led by a creepy woman(Darah). Bloodfest ensues. The orig­i­nal short film that this movie was adapted from had an evil woman jug­gling sev­eral vis­i­tors around her house while she tried to kill them all with­out the rest notic­ing. Apparently this made for some inter­est­ing pac­ing and com­edy. In Darah, they threw out the com­edy, but kept the ten­sion of simul­ta­ne­ous sit­u­a­tions occur­ing all over the house. We even ven­ture out­side of the house a few times, and the plot pulls off just enough lit­tle twists to keep you atten­tive even after the blood starts splash­ing. The tit­u­lar Darah is quite strik­ing and eerie at the same time, despite the actress hav­ing her back­ground in comedy(yep). She, along with the rest of her creepy chain­saw chil­dren are tanks. I can’t quite say they’re very badass, but they’re def­i­nitely tanks. Every time the poor group of friends enter a fight with one of the bad guys, it’s like watch­ing a bunch of lit­tle peo­ple scur­ry­ing around throw­ing rocks at a tank while it leisurely dri­ves around and shoots pain at them. Other than for Darah though, the act­ing doesn’t stand out, and nei­ther does the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion or the script. Like I said, noth­ing very new. I was told the movie has strong female char­ac­ters, but I’m not the sort to be par­tic­u­larly impressed by fem­i­nism in art. The action-y bits are okay, plenty to go around and many dif­fer­ent weapons of pain, includ­ing a cross­bow and a sword (not together in the same scene though). Also, the lit­tle leaps of logic may or may not bother you; there is a scene where a police­man fires mul­ti­ple shots at a tar­get that’s mov­ing directly towards him and some­how man­ages to miss all of them. I guess it’s an alright film, but there are bet­ter things to watch. Only see if you’re inter­ested in what Indonesia/Singapore has to offer, or if you just need some­thing to pass the time with some friends. Written by: Yap Chen Sing