Rak Mai Mi Wan Tai (2011)

Love Never Dies (Ruk Mai Mee Wun Tay) was my first Thai lakorn. Of course, it is no where near the quality of the highly polished Korean dramas, the drama expertise of Taiwanese dramas and the creativity of Japanese dramas. Where dramas from 3rd world countries are concerned, Love Never Dies is a fairly good watch. Here's my review:

Story: It is a vampiric love story and where storyline goes, it actually has a better storyline than the Hollywood produced Twilight saga! If only it has the budget of Twilight, the filming technologies, the directing expertise, the believable props and CGI effects - it would have beaten Twilight hands down!

Acting/Cast: This is the lakorn that added Dome into my list of men in my harem. He makes a very dashing vampire conflicted with his human sentiments and feelings for a very annoying human female. When I say annoying.. I really mean ANNOYING! The female lead's character is that of a persistent, chatty and irritating person. When she is not complaining, she is whining and when she is not whining, she is shouting! It took considerable patience to overlook such acting to buy into the story of this lakorn. In the end, the story won and I am glad I stuck with it to the end.

Music: Nothing worth mentioning here. The OSTs are appropriate to the mood of the lakorn but they are not impressive enough to find their way into your iPod and bathroom karaoke.

Rewatch value: There is something about this lakorn that made me re-watch it twice. Of course, adequate time had passed between viewing. I am not adversed to re-visit it since there are a number of pretty interesting scenes in it but I would not re-watch it entirely either. Fast fowarding it to the important scenes is the method I would recommend you to re-watch this lakorn.

Overall: Where vampiric love stories go, this one is not too bad. I give it a 7.5/10.

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I know you want to watch this lakorn- handsome guys, possible harem feel, vampire theme, and there is romance too. But please watch this with the understanding that this lakorn is frustrating and you really have to ignore some things.
The good: The storyline is very good and if the execution was a bit better it would have been awesome. The basics- a 400 yr old vampire is looking to undo the vampire curse and ends up getting help from a pretty and young artifact restorer. There are no evil mothers, not a whole lot of typical clichés, and some funny parts. The romance is legit and the chemistry is off the charts (the leads were actually former lovers). The ending is a good, sweet ending that ties up all the ends.
The Bad: The worst non-evil clueless family ever they are incredibly annoying and are super over protective. I don’t know if its just me, but all of the women in this lakorn were super whiny, omg it was so annoying! While I love a strong female lead character, this one was unable to admit her mistakes, pretended to be strong, got into trouble and needed saving, and talked way too much.
Typically I have second lead syndrome, but all of the other men were depicted with some major personality defect that you could only root for the main male lead. Part of the fun is being torn between two hot guy characters for the female lead- but our only choices were a perfect rich guy with a dark secret or a nosy, overbearing, childhood friend who is fixated on one girl. Of course there was very little character development, and it was only for the two lead characters.

All in all: I am a sucker for hot guys, romance and vampires- but I won’t come near this one again. There were too many flash backs, way too much time given to long contemplative glances, and the most I have yelled at my computer in a long time. By the end I loved the end characters, loved the story, hated all supporting characters, and hated the theme music. I wish someone had told me how annoying the people were before I dove in.

p.s. I have never seen such shoddy police work in my life- literally the police made unsupported guesses all 11 eps!!

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