VAULT VLOG: B-Sol & Wee-Sol Take on THE HOST

I apologize for the video getting cut off mid-way. We tried to do it over several times, to no avail. PhotoBooth is a most cantankerous and frustrating program--even moreso when your co-host is a five-year-old. You'll understand that I eventually had to throw in the proverbial towel...

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Will You Like What You See in Mirrors?

Today's post comes from guest writer Charles Poladian, a reviewer for TheMusic.FM and an avid horror fan. He brings us a write-up on Mirrors, the latest Korean remake from Alexandre Aja, just out on DVD and Blu-Ray...

Mirrors, adapted from the Korean film Into the Mirror, and directed by Alexandre Aja, stars Kiefer Sutherland as Ben Carson, a former detective who quit after a traumatic shooting death on the job. Losing his family, income and livelihood, Ben is out on the couch staying with his sister, Angela Carson (played by Amy Smart.)

When Ben decides to start the rebuilding process, he gets a job as the night watchman for the abandoned Mayflower Department store. The place burned down tragically and is left to ruin due to insurance battles. Of course, for Ben, things become strange. There are glimpses of burnt victims and flailing limbs. Ben’s last straw comes when he sees himself on fire, feels it, but suffers no damage.

Through detective work, Ben soon gets to the bottom of all the strangeness. As Ben gets closer to these occurrences, his family and his life are soon in jeopardy. The movie races towards this conclusion, as it is only a matter of time until everyone he loves dies.

What Mirrors, and Aja, do best is create a claustrophobic atmosphere. It’s a clever spin, to use something as ever-present as mirrors to do the evil bidding. The effects and killing scenes are also worth mentioning. The opening scene ends with the mirror personality slicing through the throat of the victim, exposing the windpipe in the process, with a shard of glass from the broken mirror. It’s unflinching and what Aja is known for, from the scenes in High Tension to The Hills Have Eyes. The camera does not shy away and the viewer is meant to watch; as helpless as the victim. The department store, as a setting, is a fun horror house and leads to many creepy moments.

Unfortunately this fun premise and Aja’s skills as a director get lost in a mediocre second half. It becomes formulaic, essentially watching the main character trying to solve and resolve before it’s too late. The movie is pretty tightly paced, but has weaker transitions due to this tempo. And to top it off, there is a twist ending.

The movie could have been stuck in neutral yet still be an enjoyable watch without this ending. It’s superfluous and leaves a bad taste in your mouth, which is the main reason Mirrors falls flat. It becomes absorbed in the trappings of modern horror movies. It must be a cultural divide as well, because these remakes tend to not live up to the hype. The Grudge was mediocre as a ghost story, although The Ring still stands as the best of the bunch.

Alexandre Aja knows how to work a story and knows how to work a remake. Unfortunately, Mirrors does not succeed like his previous two outings. It could be a fun time if you catch it with the right people, but for the aficionados it may be lacking. It’s a minor step back, but Aja still has a flair for horror. His next movie is Pirahnas 3-D, which could be an awesome time at the movies.

Last line for this is rent it if you want, don’t buy. There are no features aside from trailers and the choice between theatrical and unrated.

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The Wig: Evil Hair. Yawn.

Just when I thought the Koreans could do no wrong when it came to spine-tingling horror exports, along comes The Wig (a.k.a. Gabal), a ponderous flick about two sisters terrorized by a haunted hairpiece.

The film, originally released in South Korea in 2005, tells the tale of Su-hyeon, a woman suffering from leukemia, whose sister and roommate Ji-hyeon gives her a wig to cover the baldness which results from her chemotherapy. But little do either of them know that the wig was actually made from the hair of a suicide victim (gasp!), and thus Su-hyeon begins to take on the characteristics of the hair's original owner (which, needless to say, are not pleasant ones.)

Right off the bat, we've got an inescapably silly premise, and director Shin-yeon Won takes it all way too seriously. While interestingly shot, the pace is discouragingly slow for the most part, and the structure is such that at times the plot can be pretty tough to follow. Then, once you actually figure things out, it all turns out to be so cliche you almost wishe you still didn't know what the heck was going on.

The film's only memorable performance is given by Seon Yu as Ji-hyeon, the perpetually anguished and put-upon sister of the possessed wig-wearing cancer victim. Of course, she puts in her solid performance in spite the maddeningly inexplicable decision of screenwriter Hyun-jung Do to make her character completely mute as a result of a car accident which is vaguely connected to the wig, but never fully explained.

The scares are few and far between, and in this case the marketing of the American DVD as "Unrated" is particularly cynical. There's nothing beyond PG-13 level material here, but when it comes down to it, any foreign film that is released straight to DVD in the U.S. without being submitted to the MPAA for a rating can technically be termed "unrated".

The big revelation near the end manages to be confusing, ludicrous and boring all at the same time. And the final scenes, meant to be both shocking and poignant, are just clumsy.

Director Shin-yeon Won may be a talented stylist, and "one to watch", as some critics have branded him--but his debut The Wig is definitely not a picture that does his nascent skills any justice. He's made two more horror/thrillers since, which are allegedly far better, so he may become a major player in Asian horror despite this lackluster first effort.

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Black House Brings the Scares, K-Horror Style

"I never knew insurance could kill people."

So says Jun-oh, the main character of Black House, the newest South Korean horror film to gain an American DVD release. And neither did I, until I saw this movie. It's unfortunate that those without an understanding of a film's original language can never fully assess its dialogue. But clumsy translations aside, Black House--a.k.a. Geomeun Jip--is a well-made and enjoyable hybrid of psychological thriller and slasher flick.

For those who care about this sort of thing, this review will contain some big-time spoilers, but there's just no way for me to do the movie justice without them. That said, this is an intelligent horror movie that deals primarily with the issues of psychopaths living in our midst every day, and how they coexist--or fail to do so--with the rest of society.

The central conflict is between the antagonist Yi-Hwa, a cold-blooded killer who remorsely maims and slaughters her own husbands and children for insurance money, and the aforementioned Jun-oh, a protagonist so deeply empathetic that he cannot even bring himself to kill Yi-Hwa, even when directly threatened by her. This clash of a pure psychopath and the most humane of heroes is particularly interesting, especially in their final confrontation--a very clever take on the classic slasher movie ending in which the killer inflicts her final wound to the hero by destroying herself despite his efforts to prevent it.

The revelation of Yi-Hwa as the murderer is one of the film's major twists, as we are initially led to believe it is her obviously odd husband who is masterminding the insurance crimes. A female movie slasher is an extremely rare thing, and the beautiful Seon Yu plays Yi-Hwa in chillingly effective fashion. Jeong-min Hwang also acquits himself well as the hapless yet good-hearted insurance agent Jun-oh.

First-time director Terra Shin does a solid job of building tension during the picture's well-paced and suspense-driven first half. This only adds to the payoff later, when the movie takes a turn into Saw-like "torture porn" territory. (We even get a particularly hard-to-watch car-key-to-the-eye-socket shot. After Hostel and now this, I'm beginning to think that young one-eyed Asian women are becoming a new horror staple.) And as with most films of this type, it is all extremely well photographed.

But Black House is a bit more intelligent than its American counterparts. Not content to shock us with non-stop violence wrapped in the feeblest of social messages, the movie attempts to deal more deeply with some morality concerns. If psychopaths are afflicted with mental illness, does that absolve them of blame? Do they deserve pity, or does pitying them simply make us easier prey? Is murder ever justified? The movie ventures into the kind of moral territory most slashers never do.

The movie is based on a novel by Japanese writer Yusuke Kishi, which was previously adapted in Japan into the 1999 film Kuroi Ei. I haven't seen that, so I can't compare the two (anyone who has is welcome to.) I'm not sure, therefore, whether to blame some of the movie's hard-to-ignore plot holes on the book or the screenplay (wouldn't a red flag be raised if Yi-Hwa has a history of cashing in on the loss of her spouses?)

There's also a certain amount of predictability at work--the second you see how happy Jun-oh and his girlfriend are, you just know she's going to be put in some serious danger before the film is out. But I'm not one to quibble too much about predictability. Someone once said that all the great ideas are already taken, and it's true--there are no new plot devices. Rather, what matters is how the plot devices are executed, and in Black House they are, by and large, done quite well.

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Asian Horror Cinema

Greetings readers, this is Karl Hungus (of karlhungus.com fame) contributing an article for The Vault of Horror, so I'd like to pay my respects to B-Sol for running an excellent blog, and I hope everyone finds this a worth addition to the Vault. The subject for this is of course Asian Horror, so without further delay, I'll begin.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man from director Shinya Tsukamoto was my first introduction to Japanese horror, and I think it was pivotal in bringing the darker side of Japanese cinema to western audiences. It was a terrifying black & white nightmare, an extremely twisted evolution of David Cronenberg's "Body Horror" where a man is slowly being transformed into living metal. That film absolutely chilled me one night when I was a teenager, and I'd say it started a love affair with horror from the east.

It was one of a few films that came out of Japan in the late 80's that widely set the bar for part of what we know as J-Horror today; the more visceral films that take their inspiration from the likes of Cannibal Holocaust. 1988's Evil Dead Trap (An unfortunate title, as the original Japanese name translates as "Prudent Trap") gave us a fairly thrashy, yet competent gore movie, where a female news reporter receives what appears to be a snuff video, and sets off to investigate whether or not it's real, leading her crew into a literally deadly trap, where they are tortured and killed in grotesque fashion.

Japan became rather infamous for extreme torture films, and in essence, fake snuff videos. Guinea Pig: Flowers of Flesh and Blood was quite an ordeal to watch, and while I can appreciate the surreal display of poetry interjected with dismemberment, as a man dressed as a samurai warrior recites haiku in between butchering a young girl, it's not something I'd be too thrilled to see again. The only other film in the notorious Guinea Pig series I've seen is the 4th one Mermaid in a Manhole, which serves not so much as a fake snuff film, but offers up a genuinely disturbing and unique experience.

It's without a doubt that filmmakers in Japan had reached the pinnacle of extreme gore movies, but rather than continue into farce, a more mature kind of film emerged. In 1999, director Takashi Miike brought us Audition, which not only became one of my favourites, it was one of the first wave of films that put J-Horror on the map big time. It's a dark, slow burning affair that builds it's characters first, playing out like a drama, before taking a shift in tone towards more of a mystery, building the suspense, and finally grabbing the audience by the throat in the shocking finale. It's the kind of film Alfred Hitchcock would make if he had ever directed a gore movie, sombre and reserved, like a Psycho for modern times, an introspective into themes of recurring violence and it's consequences.

Miike didn't stop there, and while Audition was quietly tempered, Ichi The Killer was excess itself. A powerfully over the top Yakuza slasher, steeped in sadism, and moments of David Lynch like ambiguity. Further down the Lynchian ladder, we have Gozu which is much more surreal than anything that has come before it, but none the less an extremely good film, that is both disturbing and quite comical at times.

2000's Battle Royale was another of that first wave, along with Audition and Ring, a combination of B-movie sensibilities and ultra-slick direction. Plot wise, it's a half way between Lord Of The Flies and an 80's low budget sci-fi action movie. However, under Kinji Fukasaku's direction, it becomes one of the slickest pieces of action and brutality there is, so while not strictly a horror, it's definitely an important film.

This brings us to the film that needs no introduction, easily the most influential of all J-horrors, Ring. Director Hideo Nakata created one of the most perfect horror films ever, and cemented the image of pale women with long, black hair into popular culture. To say this had a knock-on effect would be to sell it's influence short, as the film paved the way for numerous others like The Grudge, from director Takashi Shimizu who also went on to work with Shinya Tsukamoto in the excellent Marebito. Before long, we had a vast amount of Japanese horrors that took their queue from Ring, Dark Water and Pulse being just a few in many. Sadly, the film had also sparked a revolution in remakes, when The Ring came out, nobody could stop Hollywood from cannibalising all Asian horrors they could get their hands on.

This brings us neatly to K-Horror, as South Korea were the first to remake Ring back in 1999 as The Ring Virus. I felt that for the most part, Korean ghost stories had been inferior to their Japanese counterparts. They weren't bad films by any stretch, but by the time 2003's Acacia came along, it felt like I've seen it all before. A Tale Of Two Sisters however, absolutely blew me away, it was a breath of fresh air that was greatly needed, and director Ji-woon Kim was certainly a talented individual. If you were to ask me what scared me the most, I would say it's probably this one, I hadn't be frightened by a film so deeply since I first watched Ring. Kim also directed the darkly comic The Quiet Family in 1998, which in turn was remade by Takashi Miike as The Happiness of the Katakuris, both versions I would seriously recommend.

Another Korean title that came out in 2003 is the absolutely bonkers Save The Green Planet, which is part black comedy, part sci-fi, and part torture film, with liberal sprinklings of drama. Others such as Into The Mirror and military ghost story R-Point are also extremely well done, and worth a look, even if they are quite unoriginal. Taking us on a completely different path in 2006 was the excellent monster movie The Host, throwing up some comic laughs with an extremely compelling rampage.

Other Asian countries also had their go at the horror genre, with Hong-Kong/Singapore co-production The Eye being one film that really scared me witless at the time, and Abnormal Beauty is another psycho-sexual horror, which takes it's queue from the more gore orientated films of the 80's I've mentioned above. Thailand has also tried it's hand with the excellent Shutter, which isn't particularly original, but it's just so well made and scary that you can forgive the formulaic effort.

Overall, Asia has a lot to offer the horror fan, and while a lot of the ghost stories can be very by the numbers story wise, they can still be worthwhile and very scary experiences. In fact, I've seen a hell of a lot of Asain horrors, and there's really only been one that I thought was a complete waste of my time, and that's Thai film Bangkok Haunted.

So, I hope this has been an enjoyable read, and that you've gleaned something from it.

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