Diecovery – A Movie A Day #78
Diecovery – A Movie A Day #78
Diecovery is a low-budget supernatural horror movie from Thailand in 2003. I picked it up a while ago in a 2-DVD pack along with another Thai horror movie, Taxi Tonight. Neither movie looked particularly good when I bought them, but I really enjoy getting cheap, multi-disc movie packs. Most of the movies you’ll get in these packs are decent yet forgettable, but occasionally you’ll come across some real gems. Diecovery is not one of those gems, but I liked it fine.
The title aside (which I don’t like at all), Diecovery feels like a nice homemade horror movie. It’s like something my friends and I might have done over a weekend when I was younger. By that, I mean that there are nice ideas, but a lack of budget and experience kept the movie from ever really rising above the many, many other cheaply made horror movies out there.
The story follows a young married couple as they take a delayed honeymoon away from the big city. They go to a resort in the “wilderness” of Thailand (I put that in quotes because they are in the woods, but they’re barely outside the city). The resort holds a dark secret though. Years earlier, a woman was killed and buried on the grounds by the resort’s owners. The specific details around her death and its cover-up are unraveled as the mystery unfolds, but the end result is that the resort is cursed. That leads to supernatural happenings (and a few natural happenings) that get more and more sinister.
It’s a ghost story in the vein of The Grudge or many other vengeful spirit movies. So yeah, I liked the ideas, but what actually made it to the screen sometimes comes across pretty silly. The woman’s death is confusingly edited, and it’s abundantly clear that her dead body is a very floppy dummy. There are some computer effects that look real janky. The acting is mostly about the quality you’d expect from something so cheap, but you know, I did think the two lead characters were engaging. They worked well as a couple, and I enjoyed watching them. That, plus the fact that the ghost (when she finally showed up) looked pretty cool is about all I really need.
Diecovery isn’t great, but I had some fun with it. I’d watch it again.