13 Real Asian Horror Stories is one of those ghost story collection films that are prominent quite a bit throughout Asian horror. Every country has at least one of them, a collection of short stories that are usually based on real-life events that are used to catch the viewer off guard and to make them shiver.

13 Real Asian Horror Stories starts off amazingly. The tense atmosphere and build up had goosebumps rising on my skin and made me somewhat anxious. The starting story seemed amazing even if the acting was pretty bad. I can sit through some bad acting for a good adrenaline rush and I wasn't going to condemn the film for a bit of bad acting before it properly kicked off.
And then I got to 6 minutes into the film where we see our first scary occurrence and at this point, I have regrets within utter split seconds.

This films CGI and special effects are so bad, I honestly thought it looked like it was edited on MS Paint. The first ghost we actually see looks like a superimposed video meme, and that was it. Once the first tense moment is ruined by this MS Paint looking ghost foot, the tension is gone. It struggles to build it back up again and struggles to hold up its premise of a good horror film as everyone so says it is.

There was maybe one story in this I really liked and though the actors held their own in - the music box segment. Even this one, being my favourite easily and maybe even one of my favourite short Asian horror shorts, fell short (no pun intended) in keeping it's special effect up. The ending of the segment itself was cringy and eye rolling.
The rest of the individual stories were just shockingly boring. I understand that these are small occurrences that have happened in people's everyday lives but there was no fear factor to them. To say that these were horror stories, I would even say, is a bit of a reach. These are more slice of life segments or could even be argued as a mock documentary.

I don't want to criticise the actors too much as it was clearly their first proper acting roles for many of them rather than a small cameo or a short guest role in the background of a film or drama, but really the acting just missed the mark completely. The child actors, I understand their issues with being on film a little more than the adult actors, but also a lot of the child actors acted better than some of the adults. I would be interested to watch some of the casts' later roles that they had after this if they did have any, but if they did get anything else after 13 Real Asian Horror Stories, I would be utterly shocked.

Overall, if I go on more about my issues with this, this review is going to end up a short novella - inherently, this has a good premise. This film had a lot going for it but utterly missed the mark completely. There are plenty of other horror story film collaborations that have the exact same issues (small budget, brand new to acting casts, etc.) and have managed to put out utter gems. This took me six hours to watch because I kept struggling to stay awake and find any form of interest in the film after the first 6 minutes. Honestly, skip this, catch a different horror film/story collaboration and enjoy your time watching a film instead.

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