HISTERIA

Semalam aku tgk satu cite ni.

LJ,Scha,Nurliyana S berlakon.Then ada la lagi org lain

yg aku x bape kenal.Vee,Kaza ada gak.

Cite ni mmg agak menakutkan la bg aku.

Siap ada mentera lagi.Kisah sal budak yg salu dibuli.

Well kita takkan sangka yg budak yg nampak baek ni,ada gak simpan dendam.

Seme manusia ada sifat marah,but then tak tersangka if

ada yg sanggup gunakan "benda lain"sbg bahan untuk

melunaskan dendam dan api kemarahan yg terbuku.

Ni ada siket review....

While James may often bore us with his extremely slow-moving independent "arthouse" films, fortunately, Histeria doesn't have much dead air and moves along quite nicely, thanks to the director keeping things happening all the time, and nice art direction that manages to create a disturbing atmosphere. James keeps the hallways and corridors of the school in which the story takes place, draped in shadows, always with a single light source that nicely isolates its protagonists and surrounding them with the dark unknown. The visual set-ups evoke expectations that there are things just within the peripheral of our vision and entice our eyes to roam and search each frame.

Histeria concerns a group of schoolgirls at a boarding school who play a prank on their teachers and a local shaman one night. One of them pretends to be possessed and hysterical. Pissed off at being duped, the shaman then tells the girls that such things are not fun and games, and that only bad things will befall them.

The girls are then punished by the principal who has them stay in the old wing dormitory of the school and doing cleaning up chores, while the rest of the school goes on a long holiday break.To kill their boredom, the girls tell each other ghost stories, play a prank on the new girl among them, and plan secret rendezvouses with their boyfriends. One day, one of the girls sees the school gardener planting something in an isolated area of the school grounds. She digs it up and finds that it's a strange bag of bones. That's when the fun begins for the audience.

Copious amounts of blood are spilled as the girls are killed off one by one by an unseen being.

And here, you need to know yet another thing about Malaysian cinema: filmmakers usually do not risk pushing violence and risque elements too far lest their work gets butchered by the censors. Histeria does attempt to go as far as it can, with a severed head and spilled intestines, but the actual acts of violence are done non-graphically or with jerky camera moves and quick editing. I'm not sure if they have a more graphic version cut specially for foreign audiences, as filmmakers here often do. But half the excitement is gone when the promise of terrible violence remains just that - undelivered promise.

But James does a commendable job here creeping us out with his visual set-ups, and characters that for once, actually behave logically in a Malaysian horror movie. He elicits some good performances from the young actresses, especially Liyana Jasmay who plays Murni, the girl who is pushed around by the others and who finally goes over the edge when the terror becomes unbearable for all of them.

But if anything were to be blamed for being the biggest flaw of the movie, it would be the script that allows the last moments of the movie to become another typical monster flick with the victims running helter-skelter, screaming and dying.

There is a great potential in the story to be more than just that. Here are a group of confused teenagers still discovering who they really are (with touches of lesbianism, and a "controversial" kissing scene that stirred the conservative mainstream film scene), stalked by a demon with the ability of taking on the identity of its victims. But sadly that is not fleshed out, delved into, nor shaped into a relevant subtext.