When three young ladies of varying degrees of beauty and varying degrees of intelligence head to Thailand to teach English and enjoy a summer of fun, they get far more than they bargained for as the spirit of a little girl is out for revenge. It is a good premise, a familiar one perhaps, but one that has worked on more than one occasion so it was too bad that the filmmakers could not really make it work here.

The biggest reason why this film failed at its story is due to the extremely poor script and thusly, followed by some pretty poor acting. The women of the film – Emily O’Brien, Ciara Hanna and Jackie Moore were not without talent, they simply had nothing to work with and what there was, was simply not that good making their performances seem wooden and pretty lifeless. There was nothing likeable about the characters whatsoever except their looks and even that was not enough to save the movie from being the mess that it turned out to be. The best of the bunch was Hanna who finally became interesting after she was possessed by the little dead girl, but it was too little, too late. The film might have had a smaller budget than some, but it did look good and director James Cullen Bressack made the best film possible with what he had, but he should have stuck to directing rather than trying to pen his own movie’s script. It was an admirable try, but the characters and dialogue were bad and as a viewer, you simply could not get behind them.

Surprisingly decent were the special effects and though there were a few times where you could tell that they were using rubber knives, on the whole, this really was a horror film with a lot of blood and gore and some truly disturbing scenes. So where the movie failed in some spots, it succeeded in others.

This definitely is not a film worth seeking out, but it is also not the worst film you will ever see. If you were to come upon this movie after some sort of apocalypse hit the Earth and you could find some electricity, it will pass the time – otherwise there are far better movies you could be watching other than Pernicious.

2 out of 5