For all its cheesy special effects and hammy acting, I’ve got to admit I have a soft spot for the recently ended season of Keliwon, Thursday nights on TV3. It gave us something to look forward to after a long day of usually mundane (or sometimes crazy insane) work and I was kinda wondering what TV3 would do with the slot.

I was worried it’d be back to some Shamsul Yusof-driven Impak Maksima clone, or worse, one of those interminable Malay telenovelas with the same actors reprising precisely the same roles with varying levels of makeup thickness.

A couple Sundays ago it was revealed that Khabir Bhatia had finished his foray into the horror genre, with a series of tales set in an apartment block called Tower 13. Early trailers showed buckets of sirap (why they can’t actually make proper fake blood is beyond me) splashing down doors and out of faucets, suitably creepy female entities skulking around the insides of bathrooms and of course the ubiquitious number 13 painted in red on a yellow bulb.

Stylish, eh?

So we sat down to catch the first episode last night, and if it’s any indication – Kabir Bhatia has added me to his list of fans. The show opens with a man stabbing himself in the eye with a knife, and eventually his body is found in his blood spattered apartment. The investigating officer (who doesn’t do much beyond glare and act all Horatio Caine-ey) reveals to the viewer that the deceased was a former medium for a reality TV show (aha!).

So the blood spattered trail leads to the building manager (who surprisingly works till night) and so he sits down the incredulous detective and tells him of the many, many deaths in Tower 13, which segues into each week’s episode I guess.

A show like this would be incomplete without skulking creepy characters, so we get one in the form of a blind girl who keeps on popping out of nowhere and talking cryptically to our building manager. For comic relief (and obvious Islamic values) we have an ustaz who tries to unlock a door with a recitation after successfully banishing some sort of blood demon manifestation.

All in all, not bad for 45 minutes.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and I recommend you do too.