A guy inherits an old house that was once a school of traditional Thai dancing, and plans to renovate it into a tourist resort. Unfortunately he didn't stop to consider that these events take place in Asia.

Long haired ghost!

First of all, does this movie exist? I just apparently watched it on Amazon instant video, but I think it's safe to assume "House of Haunted" isn't its rightful name so I figured I'd look it up on the disinformation superhighway and present y'all with the relevant facts. No mention of this film exists anywhere on the internet. Not on imdb, not on Amazon where it's streaming, not even on the wikipedia entry for "List of Thai Movies" is there any movie by this name or even general description. I guess somewhere out there in Thailand or Cambodia there's a movie about ghosts in a dancing school, and it's probably called something. You can't buy it.

Anyway the movie. Despite my ethnic stereotyping up there this is not the usual Asian ghost thing. In fact there's hardly a glaring white-faced ghost to be seen. This movie is nothing but plot exposition. That is, it spends its entire running time in extended flashback sequences explaining very matter-of-factly why the house is haunted, and never actually gets around to the shocking and fatal ghost encounters that are the leading cause of death in Asia.

Had the meticulously overexposed backstory at least been creepy or super violent it might have still qualified as a horror movie, but it's mostly just a repetition of disfunctional domestic scenes. This is basically a 90 minute cautionary tale about what happens when you marry
a jerk.

Yet I found myself really wanting to trip on this because now and then for just a flicker the Thai dancing would squirt a bunch of exotic colours and perfumes in my face. For those who've never seen it, Thai dancing isn't so much dancing as a series of slow awkward postures, and that combined with what to the Western mind sounds like music from Mars produces this druggy mesmerising effect. In fact the whole reason I picked this movie off Amazon instead of some big loud American thing full of teenagers and F-words was in the hope of doping up my brain on nightmarish scenes of freaky Thai ghost dancers terrifying people to death. Sadly though most of the dancing is just student girls doing practise moves, so the movie kind of sucks at its main thing.

Pretty sad and depressing though. Sisters, don't marry guys who are on the opium.