Have been following the hype of these Asian horror movies, “The Coffin” and “Phoonk”, but in fact, I haven’t got the chance to watch it both yet. Thai new supernatural story “The Coffin” by award-winning filmmaker Ekachai Uekrongtham (Beautiful Boxer, Pleasure Factory), and stars some of the most familiar Asian casts including Karen Mok (So Close, Shaolin Soccer), Ananda Everingham (Shutter, Pleasure Factory), and Andrew Lin, had opened this past weekend in Thailand and grabbed the top spot at the box office. And those outside of Thailand or South Korean will have to wait to see the film. Luckily, even though I still haven’t seen it, I’ve found some helpful reviews for the film as well with “Phoonk”, which now I want to share it here.

First review is made by KONG RITHDEE, taken from bangkokpost.com
Here are some of the paragraphs:

So Ekachai Uekrongtham - whose best work remains Beautiful Boxer, his feature debut about the life of a transvestite boxer - gives us The Coffin, a kind of visual manifesto on cinematic pax Asiana in which the cast of Hong Kong, Japanese, half-Lao and pure Thai characters encounter the ultimate truth in the art of terror: Siamese ghosts are the real emissaries of globalisation, fair and indiscriminate in its posthumous enthusiasm to scare people regardless of their nationalities. Exciting, but only if they have a little more ingenuity in their pan-Asian spook campaign.

Modern ghost movies are often morphed into detective stories - the haunted track down the origins and the motives of the ghosts, usually with the help of scientists, undertakers, and Google, all featured in The Coffin. What challenges director Ekachai, however, I think, is to extract the human drama out of the tired formulation of a ghost narrative. Love, longing, despair, crushed hope - these are the emotions the film tries to unearth from the heavy pile of creepy setpieces and sound effects. And although the film has a strong oomph for scary sequences, it can't really dig through its own conceits to find the genuine ache of these people defeated by fate. (A recent success case is The Orphanage, a Spanish ghost drama that manages to end with something like an epiphany of motherly love.)

Ekachai, who's a well-known theatre director both in Thailand and Singapore, has a good eye for small gestures that make his films echo, as he did in Beautiful Boxer, and less impressively, in Pleasure Factory. He seems less nimble here in his first horror outing, whose playbook requires him to shock us every five minutes. It just feels mechanical. "How could you make death so seductive?" said Chris, commenting on his girlfriend's painting. The Coffin sets out to do the same, in earnest, and almost succeeds.

The second review is come from Wise Kwai from Thaifilmjournal, which gave the film 3 stars out of 5 rating.
Here are some of the paragraphs:

Can you change your luck? Can you escape bad karma? Can you cheat death?
In The Coffin, those questions are answered with a resounding "No!" in the form of a 10-wheel truck T-boning a Mercedes-Benz sedan.
It happens pretty quickly too. And once that question is out of the way early on, it frees up the rest of the movie for plenty of jump scares and scenes of ceaseless, calculated beauty from Beautiful Boxer and Pleasure Factory director Ekachai Uekrongtham.

But they sure do look good. Horror is rarely this gorgeous. There's the symmetry of hundreds of coffins, arranged in concentric circles around a giant sitting Buddha, as well as a long closet, full of mirrors, all reflecting terror. Even the creepy old remote Buddhist temple has an idyllic charm. These are all from the eye of Ekachai, whose background in theatre makes the The Coffin like a stage production.

“Phoonk” review is come from movietalkies.com

They have given the film 3 STARS OUT OF 5.
After all the hype and hoola that director Ram Gopal Varma created about his latest film, Phoonk, a film about black magic, one at least expected to be scared. The best that Ramu manages to do in the film is to startle his viewers. There is nothing remotely scary about the movie, and like most Hindi films belonging to this genre, all that happens is a lot of noises, stealthy camera movements and people screaming and looking scared. So it's best not to treat this as a horror film. As a film about a man who is an avowed atheist, but is finally forced to acknowledge the presence of the dark, unexplainable other, it still makes sense.

The actors turn in a very good performance. The couple played by Amruta and Sudeep enact their parts very well. The child actor in the role of Raksha does a very good job. The others, like KK Raina and Lillette are adequate too. Zakir Hussain as the ojha is very effective. One almost didn't recognize him in the beginning, in his getup. Ashwini Kalsekar, with her large kohl lined eyes and designer black bindis is effective as well as the evil Madhu. She has a strong screen persona which makes her a good choice for the role. She plays it well, but one felt that the evil strak didn't quite come out very well. She was more loud than evil.

The film makes for interesting viewing. But from Ram Gopal Varma one expected a little bit more. If all he wanted to say was scratch the surface and even a so called rational Indian will believe in black magic, then yes, he manages to make the point, but only to an extend. The build up is not good enough for that point, as Rajiv seems more reactive. The character does not come across as a true blue rationalist. On either counts, Varma's intentions fail. What he does excel is in the atmospherics. So full marks to him on that count.