Three young American women travel to Thailand to spend the summer teaching, but before they set one foot in a classroom they upset an angry local spirit in Pernicious. This VOD horror travelogue has a set-up that promises heaping portions of genre-friendly sex and violence, but while it briefly delivers that violence, it upends the usual horror movie tropes of sexually active youth punished by a slasher with an insatiable blood thirst.
The movie begins with a prelude set sometime in the past: behind a screen, a man is tortured and killed while a little girl meets a violent fate. Flash forward to the sisterhood of the traveling cut-offs: Alex (Ciara Hanna), a typical dumb blonde, her sister Rachel (Jackie Moore), a tough blonde, and brunette Julia (“The Young and the Restless’s” Emily O’Brien), smarter than her friends but still condescending to the locals.
While an elderly Thai man watches from a balcony, the young women arrive by boat at an elegant thatched house where they will spend their tutoring days. Like feral children who don’t know how to behave in a department store, they cause trouble the moment they step off the boat. Alex snatches an amulet from a small spirit house at the entrance to their lodging, and as they explore the house’s top floor they uncover a crudely sculpted gold statue of a young girl.
The setup is the stuff of any number of low-budget horror movies, and the cinematography has an unpleasantly slick digital sheen, but the movie has better camerawork than you’ve come to expect from a horror genre increasingly crowded with found footage and jumpy handheld camera. Pernicious uses swooping helicopter shots and graceful crane shots to follow the unfortunate Americans in their journey to the underbelly of the Thai spirit world.
The girls have unwittingly awakened the spirit of a young girl who seeks revenge on her killer, but before any supernatural dangers become apparent, they face a more worldly danger. At a local bar, they pick up three British men, including the mean looking, unlikely stud Byron (Byron Gibson, whose C.V. includes jobs as a construction worker and Thai-boxing instructor). Thus before we have a chance to dread a supernatural monster, we dread ordinary horny men with bad teeth. Ringleader Colin (Russell Geoffrey Banks) slips the girls a roofie, but what happens next isn’t the wholesale degradation of the women but the brutal torture and murder of the men at the gleeful hands of the women. The next morning, the women wake up thinking they’d had a bad dream and find their valuables taken and the mysterious gold statue gone.
Pernicious earns its horror stripes in 10 minutes of gore, but the rest of the film is a well-shot, if inconsistently acted look at the modern world encroaching on Thai traditions that are both beautiful and deadly. Despite foreign intrusions on Thai soil, the danger to tradition isn’t blamed on foreigners but on Thailand’s own corruption of its spirit world. Like some of the best Hong Kong ghost movies, this is a B-movie that has something to say about messing with supernatural traditions. Writer-director James Cullen Bressack has made a number of VOD horror films, and though I haven’t seen any others he seems to know what he’s doing, even if he can’t get all his actresses to hit their marks. But Cullen seems to be playing with genre expectations, making sure the most evil deeds occur in the basement even if seems impractical for a thatched house by the river to even have a basement. The movie plays out more or less the way you expect it to, but it runs through its genre motions with something approaching cultural conscience. Hardcore genre fans may well wish it had more tits and gore, but it delivers solid creepy jump scares and a few pints of blood for the thirsty.