TV Review: Terror Tuesday Extreme (2024)

It’s time for some more Netflix horror in the form of Thai series Terror Tuesday Extreme (2024)! It’s based on Terror Tuesday, a radio show where people share strange stories and has 8 episodes. First, we’ll do short reviews of each episode, then rank them, and finally give our verdict on the series as a whole. Warning: SPOILERS.

EPISODE 1: OUR LITTLE SISTER

Aye and her mother are still grieving the death of her sister Elle in a car crash. However, Aye’s mother chooses a rather odd way to deal with it - she asks a sorcerer to bind her daughter’s soul to a doll…

Dolls are always creepy, and this one is no exception. There are also a bunch of rules that must never be broken or else, and it doesn’t take long for ‘Elle’ to start influencing Aye’s mother and turning her against her remaining daughter. Unfortunately, and this is something we will be saying a lot, the series decided to complicate things with a couple of last minute twists. So, after Aye makes a desperate attempt to break the binding spell, we find out that her mother, who had died in the crash, too, was also a doll and that not only had Aye been the one to order the 2 dolls, she had also been hallucinating her friend Toom. We don’t mind endings that make us question what we had seen before, but surely there was a better, less messy way of doing this? Because the revelation about the mother didn’t make much sense. Why would Aye see the Mother Doll as a person from the start and not Elle? And why even add the nonexistent friend?

EPISODE 2: WEDDING DRESS

 Even though her boyfriend, Bank, doesn’t believe in marriage nor does he like her old-fashioned mother insisting on a dowry, Milk takes a second job at a bridal shop so she can get money for their future wedding. The situation seems ideal, but slowly, a dark presence begins to take over her…

This was the most consistent episode of the bunch, and while the floating dress looked ridiculous, all the stabbings amply compensated for it. Really, this got bloody! Oh, and we loved the storage room with the flickering lights full of creepy mannequins. It’s kinda shocking no evil stuff came from there.

EPISODE 3: ODE TO MY FAMILY

Forced to move to an old house due to the father’s legal troubles, Win and his family, parents and elder sister, find a locked room sealed with a talisman against spirits. After opening it, they find it empty, but soon Win begins to believe the house is haunted…

Everything goes well until the twist. So, you get a spooky sealed room (don’t open it!), a ghost girl sneaking around, an ominous backstory for the house, possession, and a bloody family fight. Then, Win has a vision of himself and his family and realizes the deaths he read about were theirs. Turns out he killed them and then himself because he didn’t want them to leave him, but first put the three bodies in the room, locked and sealed it. So, they’re all dead and Win is stuck in a loop where the family he forced to stay torments him. We’re embarrassed to admit we didn’t get this right away, but the fact that we saw them drive to the house and there was even a flashback to the police at their home really didn’t help; and neither did the ghost girl. Who was she supposed to be and why was she even there? For the audience’s benefit? Because Win didn’t see her. One review we read said Win was in Hell, which would explain why his family was all possessed by the same entity - they’re not really there and it’s all part of his punishment. This could’ve been way better.

EPISODE 4: THE VOW

Dao and Nat have been together for 8 years, but after they pray at the Black Hills Goddess shrine and the Goddess herself pays them a visit, they find out just how much they don’t know about each other…

The Goddess’s backstory and her methods were good, even if the flaying was only an illusion. We were surprised at how mild the secrets were, and had trouble buying that ending. It might’ve been better if it had stopped with the pool fight.

EPISODE 5: SPECTRAL CLASS

After new teacher Oil visits an absent student’s home and meets his bizarre family, her life takes an unexpected, violent turn…

We liked seeing Oil go psycho in the end, but the grandmother/son duo were too clownish, and not in a funny way. On top of that, Nik’s tragic situation felt misplaced in the midst of all the weirdness. Also, we really didn’t need to see that severed dick.

EPISODE 6: GIRL NEXT DOOR

Bird moves into a new room and meets a mysterious woman. Shortly after, he finds a strange set of instructions and begins to see and hear things. Is it the drugs, or is he being haunted?

It had some good moments, but the backstory for the haunting (a love affair gone wrong) was lame and the explanation for the first note (the cheating husband’s instructions for his mistress to avoid his angry wife) removed all its spookiness. The haunting Bird had already experienced became considerably less scary when it was shown that the banging on the door and yelling were just the angry wife threatening her husband’s sidepiece. Then there was the last minute complication with a new set of instructions and the revelation that Bird had died at one point and Jane, the ghost, wanted to stop him from moving on. The new phenomena were eerie, but once more, the explanation (Bird was experiencing his own funeral rites) kinda ruined it for us. Can’t we just get a proper haunting? Sometimes a fluid timeline can make the story better, but here it just felt unnecessary. Why not just show things in chronological order? Also, why would Jane want to keep Bird with her when they barely interacted? Really, they should’ve spent more time together.

EPISODE 7: DEAR GRANNY

After her mother disappears, Montha performs a ritual for her to return home. It works and she and generally disapproving daughter Nulek are happy to have her back. But is it really granny, or did they let something else into their home?

This was so good until the series decided to give the audience yet another stupid twist. New Granny was creepy, and things got spooky when she revealed her true nature to Nulek and forced her to play a deadly game of hide-and-seek. We weren’t crazy about the loud music over the chase scene, but what ruined everything was the revelation that Nulek had already died and been brought back via the same ritual Montha used for the titular granny. Throughout the episode, Nulek kept mentioning their weird neighbour, and we later learn that he had been spying on their house because he knew Montha was alone but was acting like her daughter was still there. This doesn’t make much sense because the grandmother was there, too, so she didn’t live alone? And if Nulek was another ghost, who the hell was she messaging? Because if the neighbour thought Montha lived alone, Nulek couldn’t be visible to others, right? Good twists should astonish and shock and tie everything together, not leave people with more questions that will never be answered.

EPISODE 8: VIRAL CURSE

Ple is having trouble making ends meet as a single mother to little Kaew. However, things take a turn for the supernatural after she starts to notice some similarities between what’s going on in her life and a spooky story someone shared on Terror Tuesday.

This was easily the worst of the bunch. Ple was a frustrating lead, and most of her issues clearly stemmed from her deluded belief she could make things work with an ever increasing debt. She chose a ridiculously expensive school for her daughter, refused her friends’ help and advice, and yet wasn’t proud enough not to pawn one of her clients’ jewellery. Her landlady was surprisingly understanding and she still screwed things up. We had little sympathy for this idiot, and yes, that’s a lot of talk about money issues for what should’ve been a ghost story, but that was what the episode spent the most time on. Even the whole Ple’s life mirroring the spooky story premise was reduced to Kaew saying she played with her nonexistent sister (and why would she even call her sister if she knew she wasn’t?). The ghost was just a drowned girl whose face remained hidden by her wet hair; it had no personality, no backstory, no real bag of ghostly tricks other than switching on washing machines. Honestly, we expected it to turn out to be Ple herself, who had killed her daughter after finally losing it over her crumbling life. However, in the end, the curse seemed to have moved on to her landlady after Ple called Terror Tuesday to blame them for everything that had happened and told the story again.

TERROR TUESDAY EXTREME RANKED

This was a difficult ranking to do, but here goes:

1. Wedding Dress

2. Ode to My Family

3. The Vow

4. Dear Granny

5. Our Little Sister

6. Girl Next Door | Spectral Class

7. Viral Curse

None of the episodes were perfect or even amazing, but we felt Episode 2: Wedding Dress was the best of a lame bunch. It had some spooky moments and went all murderous in the end. Despite its flaws, we think Episode 3: Ode to My Family had a good concept and some good moments, and the family fight was suitably bloody. We didn’t like the ending of Episode 4: The Vow, but the rest was solid. Episode 7: Dear Granny got to fourth place thanks to what happened before its stupid final revelation. Episode 1: Our Little Sister, suffered from the same problem, but we thought Dear Granny’s first 2 thirds were better. Episode 5: Spectral Class and Episode 6: Girl Next Door had good moments each, but the bad outweighed the good. And finally, Episode 8: Viral Curse. Like we already said, it was the worst of them all, and had zero redeeming features. Zero. Just a terrible ending to the series.

VERDICT

All of the Terror Tuesday Extreme episodes had good premises and could’ve been much better, but unfortunately, most of them wasted it all with idiotic final twists whose revelations messed up what had come before. It just felt like there was this effort to needlessly complicate things, which isn’t a very good idea when you’re working with episodes that are only a little over 40 minutes. We really wanted to like this series, but instead found it disappointingly average.