In Thailand, people believe that lying in a coffin for a few minutes will help you remove bad luck. It follows that if you "play dead" for a few minutes, you can be reborn as a new person, leaving all that bad luck behind.

Despite for a new lease of life, cancer patient Karen Mok performs the ritual � as does Ananda Everingham whose girlfriend is in a coma. Miraculously, Karen is cured overnight while Ananda's girlfriend wakes up from coma. But everything has a price. And Karen and Ananda soon find themselves haunted by apparitions...

The Coffin is directed by Thai-born director Ekachai Uekrongtham, who's worked many years in Singapore as a theatre director (Chang and Eng). Making this film in Thailand, The Coffin is his third feature film after the transvestite drama Beautiful Boxer and the pseudo-pornographic film on Geylang, Pleasure Factory.

Yet despite his wealth of experience, The Coffin is a terrible horror flick. The story is full of holes and gaps, and the characters are poorly-drawn. The scary scenes are poorly-executed, brief and always unsurprising. By the end of the movie, we barely get to know Karen and Ananda's characters � and even the fact that Ananda takes off his shirt a few times in the movie doesn't assuage our misery.