A quintet of teens are bitten by the creepy documentary bug and decide
to make a movie about the mysterious disappearance of a dancer many years back -
and their research almost immediately turns towards the creepy when one of
their interviewees turns out to be the ghost of the dancer that's at the
center of their research ... Eventually, our heroes decide to check out
the house the dancer has been staying at - not a good idea, as the dancer
possesses one of them, kills the two male members of the team, and then
scares the shit out of the two remaining girls. The two of them ultimately
get to the room of the dancer where they read in her diary and uncover her
secret - but much good does it do them as they are not only attacked by her but
also her offspring, when ... Many months later, another team of teen
documentary filmmakers - probably making a documentary about our original
teens - arrives at the dancer's house, finds our teens' camera and plays
the tape inside ... after which one of the filmmakers finds himself
mysteriously cut off from the others ... Ok, by 2009, the concept
of teens making a creepy documentary and falling prey to the very
subject they're reseearching is no longer new, so Kuntilanak
Beranak hardly deserves any points for inventiveness - yet the first
third of the movie, where the whole story is set up, feels fairly fresh
and offers quite a few points of interest ... but unfortunately it's
downhill from there, once the main horror plot kicks in, it's just back to
conventional shocks (mostly a ghost being there in one shot and gone in
the next one shot from a slightly different angle and the like) repeated
over and over again, and the finale in the dancer's house, which should
have been a culmination of anything that happened before and also bring
some proper resolution to the whole thing, is nothing more than a bunch of
teens running through hallways in panic. All that said, Kuntilanak
Beranak is not the worst horror film I've ever seen, not by far, it's
just an unremarkable piece of genre cinema that failed to live up to its
initial promises and that you will probably have forgotten only hours
after you've seen it.
|