Presencias Malditas

Back in 2007, first time director Kim Jin-Won created an one of the most brutal films ever made. The Butcher was a snuff film entirely in first person. The two characters are strapped to chairs, giving helmets with cameras on them and brutally tortured in first person. The three men doing the torturing were filming their every move using handheld cameras.

This film was incredibly brutal and very real feeling. The director has not made another film since that. I was incredibly pumped to see that this director has made this new film for Shudder.

Unfortunately his new film isn't really great. They have some decent jump scares, great environments and the effects looked pretty good, however it has a lot of horror cliche's and the ending doesn't really do the film too much justice.

I think the film is worth a watch at least. I enjoyed it for what it was, I just wish it was better.

The Butcher was a better film. It was clever and unique for its time. Whilst it doesn't hold up too generously now a days, it still a cult classic.

John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns did it better. Watch that instead if you can find it.

I though about making my header comment... ''Warning... do NOT play'', but that was both low hanging fruit and not completely honest. This movie is not a complete waste of time, and some people might even like it more than I did-- if those people are looking for a rather formulaic Korean horror that tries really hard, but ultimately superficially, to be surprising and gripping. It is competently filmed in its own right, and you can tell that some experience was behind the making of the film, but...

The truth is the premise of a ''lost'', cursed creative product lurking to be rediscovered by an ambitious young creative was uninspired, the plot development is not nearly so innovative as alluded to (and the end was rather predictable to me), the mixing of found footage and professional was disappointingly cliched, and most glaringly, the characters were at best, stock. The mad director, the insatiably curious (and even unsympathetically unethical) young new writer looking to overcome their writer's block, the impatient producer, the earnest supporters who will likely be fodder... etc. The movie has a few honestly creepy moments, but those moments are themselves cliche, albeit fairly well done, and the addition of a few creepy scenes can not overcome the overall dullness of the movie, or the badly written characters and overacting which so many Korean directors seem to feel makes it more gripping.

At least it wasn't needlessly filled with screaming... lot's of ragged hyperventilating, but not too many screams, so that is something.

This movie has a promising premise, but everything falls apart bit by bit.

At the beginning, this film creates a good atmosphere of terror by scaring us, but that falls off throughout the film, little by little the story becomes boring and slow, ruining the promising premise. This premise is very interesting, but its poor execution means that the idea is wasted and the film is not worth watching, despite the fact that the story is related to the cinema. This film reflects the ambition that we have as human beings towards our profession and that we can do the unimaginable to achieve our goal, it also works as a criticism of film directors who, in some cases, are very demanding with their collaborators by demanding more than the expected. The film has very bad visual effects, everything looks very fake and visual credibility is lost, although the photography can be interesting and decent.

In this film, many things are not fully developed, as well as it fails to give us a good horror story despite the good premise and the promising idea that is not exploited correctly.

Watch this if you want to see a fragile "protagonist" crying, flailing and waving some sort of razor around for 25+ mins.