Geoul sokeuro
AKA Into the Mirror
Director: Sung-ho Kim
Starring: Ji-tae Yu, Myeong-min Kim, Hye-na Kim, Ju-bong Gi, Myoeng-su Kim, Young-jin Lee, Eun-pyo Jeong

(out of 4)

You're Doing It Wrong

Geoul sokeuro, the South Korean horror mystery that we’ll refer to from here on as Into the Mirror, is a movie that isn’t sure what it wants to be. In a sense, it suffers from a split personality similar to the one it deals with - it wants to be half detective drama and half supernatural ghost story, and it almost succeeds, except that the drama part is so drawn out to the point of tedium that I welcomed any supernatural occurrence to help break up the monotony. The real point though, is that the elements and camera trickery used to depict the movie’s supernatural happenings - in this case mirrors - should have been used in a more psychological sense. Instead, we must take it as a given that a ghost can enter our world through the mirror image; a better idea would have been to leave it up to the audience to decide that.

She's so vain.

The movie begins in a department store that is about to re-open after a fire that occurred a year earlier. A woman employee, who also happens to be a klepto, is getting ready to leave when she is apparently killed by her own reflection in the mirror. Enter Woo Yeong-min (played by Ji-tae Yu), chief of security at the store, who used to be a detective but quit after being indirectly reponsible for the death of his partner. (He tried to shoot the bad guy holding his partner hostage but instead shot at a mirror out of confusion). After a few other employees end up dead (killed by their reflections) Woo and the police, led by Heo Hyeon-su (Myeong-min Kim), begin separate investigations, occasionally bumping heads. (Heo still blames Woo for the partner’s death). Thrown in the mix is a woman who supposedly died in the fire (Lee Jeong-hyeon) and her twin sister Lee Ji-hyeon , just out of the mental hospital. Of course, the twin claims that the image she sees in the mirror is not really her reflection but her dead sister. So we have a disgraced detective, filled with guilt, faced with an opportunity to get his honor back, much angst on the part of the major characters, greedy owners who just want to open up the store again, and some foul play behind the scenes suggesting that Jeong-hyeon didn’t really die by accident.

Director Sung-ho Kim makes very clever use of mirrors, although I never really wondered too much about how the visual effects were achieved. For example, if a person’s mirror image starts moving around I can usually guess that the person outside the mirror is a double. What impressed me, though, was the fact that Sung-ho Kim hid his cameras so well! The idea of the “other” in the mirror has been explored before - I specifically remember John Carpenter’s Prince Of Darkness (which, like this film, suggests another reality on the other side of the mirror) and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (where Ash’s mirror image jumps out at him). A character in the film suggests that the mirror represents a second world with a second ego, as perceived by someone with a split personality. The person suffering the split thinks he is seeing two different (symmetrical) worlds. “The person is psychologically divided in two”. This explanation seems to fit in with the WTF ending (think of Silent Hill instead of The Sixth Sense), but then how come the movie bends over backwards to show us ghosts? And why have the ghost use mirrors anyway when the movie makes it clear that the ghost can manipulate objects and come into our reality at will?

Man, I don't know what to tell ya!

I still enjoyed Into the Mirror more than the usual Asian ghost story, which too often likes to use long haired creepy girls (the Ringu phenomenon) for the spook factor. The movie covers interesting ground but there’s just not enough of it, as if the creators didn’t truly believe in their mirror-world hokum and tried to keep distance from it as long as possible so they can bring us a melodramatic detective story. I can’t completely blame them, as the supernatural elements are scattershot and never really come together in the confusing ending. Sure, the ending is neat, but it’s nonsensical. I am hoping that the American remake (Mirrors) starring Kiefer Sutherland tones down the ghost and gets more psychological. But who am I kidding - the thing is directed by Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes remake) a guy not exactly known for subtlety.

-Bill G

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Amanda Wyss, Ronee Blakley, Jsu Garcia

(out of 4)

WARNING: SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD

Some 22 years later, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street still manages to offer up a creepy supernatural atmosphere and retain its ability to disturb through its creative dream sequences, even if, in 2007, I can no longer be “scared” by it (having seen the film countless times as well as its innumerable offspring and knock offs). But it is necessary to point out the importance of the film in the realm of both horror and 80s cinema. Most people today know who Freddy Krueger is, but the first Elm Street is the only one where the character is kept truly dangerous and frightening, and paradoxically, it’s the one with the smallest budget but the biggest ambitions.

How about a big hug for Uncle Freddy?

A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns a small group of 80s teens who are haunted by the ghost of dead child killer Fred Krueger (played with gusto by Robert Englund) in their dreams. The catch is that if they die in their dream, they die for real. Eventually, it’s up to resourceful Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) to stop Freddy by bringing him into the real world and finishing him off.

The main plot of the film makes for a superb jumping off point for Craven to work all sorts of literal and subtextual magic. If nothing else, you have an intriguing take on the 80s slasher movie, post Friday the 13th. The boogeyman comes to your dreams - no longer “out there” (woods), the danger is now with you everywhere. He has burn scars all over his body, wears a dirty hat and red-and-green sweater, and uses a glove with knives for fingers. Not only are your parents part of the problem (all the parents in A Nightmare on Elm Street are either delusional, self-absorbed, drunks, or a combination of all three) but they caused the problem in the first place (torching Freddy in his boiler room). Consequently, the movie is a perfect example of the “sins of the fathers” being visited upon the sons (Exodus passages as well as Euripides, Horace, Shakespeare). Speaking of Shakespeare, there is an effective dream sequence where just before Nancy sees her dead friend in a body bag being dragged across the school hallways, her classmate whispers a passage from Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

You might as well throw those sheets out.

It cannot be overstated how much the movie represents (criticizes) the era in which it was made. The parents (John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Donna Woodrum, Ed Call, Sandy Lipton) of Elm Street are worn out, tired. Nancy’s parents are divorced and they hide things from her; their brand of paternalism is not to be trusted. They have to deal with blowback from things they did in the past. The small town suburb is no longer a source of protection, and it harbors dark secrets. It’s an anti-Reagan film alright, but it also plays upon suburban paranoia, predating films like Blue Velvet and Arlington Road.

The teens, played by Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, and a new-at-the-time Johnny Depp, are likeable, and their death scenes are effective and gory. England, of course, is the one who holds it all together. Here he plays Freddy with a subdued menace, which would be thrown away in subsequent sequels in favor of silly one-liners. But this Freddy is a repulsive killer, and Craven wisely keeps him in the shadows most of the time, for a more unnerving effect. Another good move is how the editing delivers seamless flowing between the dream world and the real world. The result is disorientation regarding whether a character is dreaming or not. The suggestion that the entire film may be a dream plays into the idea that Reagan’s America, in Craven’s view, was collectively asleep. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a classic of the genre.

- Bill Gordon

Maybe try Open House another day…

The new release of the Nightmare DVD sports a nice remastered 1.85:1 print with DTS and Dolby 5.1. The commentary track featuring Wes Craven, John Saxon, and Heather Langenkamp is the same as in previous releases, but there is a new second commentary track carrying interviews with Wes Craven, producer Robert Shaye, co-producer Sara Risher, and others. There are new Infinifilm segments, the most interesting of which is the history of New Line Cinema and how the Elm Street movies made it successful. Different versions of the ending are included, but it’s really just the same ending but edited in slightly different ways. (My personal opinion is that the ending can be interpreted as both Nancy’s dream and her mother’s. This seems apparent when Nancy is driven away but the camera still focuses on her mother and her mother’s point of view. )

Fear Dot Com (2002)

Directed by: William Malone

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone, Stephen Rea, Udo Kier

(out of 4)

disappointed in the American Idol finale

fear dot com is the kind of horror movie that is 75% derivative and 25% wasted potential. There are scenes that stand out for their striking nightmarish quality, but these are scenes that belong in a better film. Stephen Dorff plays a cop who is on the trail of a serial killer who taunts him with occasional letters. There is no real fleshing out of the backstory involving the relationship between cop and killer, but no matter.. the bulk of the movie concerns a website which kills the viewer 48 hours after accessing it. Apparently, the unfortunate surfer ends up dying from his/her greatest fear, but even this plot point seems underused and glossed over - one can imagine fabulous death sequences involving one’s worst fears, but, with the exception of one clever sequence where a computer expert dies from a multiple onslaught of bugs (get it?), I suppose we’ll have to make due with the Elm Street movies.

Shoulda ran the GNU Debugger

It seems that the director decided to throw bits of other films into the mix, and stir them around, hoping for a brand new concoction; there are elements of old silent horror movies, bits of Videodrome, Strangeland, Seven, and even some of the anime series Lain. Yes, of course, the movie is a total ripoff of the Japanese film Ringu (no coincidence that this movie and The Ring were made around the same time in 2002). In addition, the technological side of this killer-web-site scenario is barely touched upon - why, for instance, is there no attempt to track down the source of the fear.com website? (Does anybody know how to do a traceroute anymore?) The philosophical undertones of the film are reduced in importance to throwaway ramblings by our serial killer (”We will provide a lesson that reducing relationships to an anonymous electronic impulse is a perversion”), and abandoned in the end to a simple track-down-the-killer horror film. While there are interesting elements scattered through fear dot com, the end result is not worth the download time - if you’re looking for a movie about a virus-in-the-wired, try The Ring, Ringu, Lain, or Ghost in the Shell; if you want merging-of-the-virtual-and-reality, see Videodrome; if you want a good noirish serial-killer movie, go with Seven.

- Bill Gordon

lonelygirl15 gets out of hand

Ju-on (The Grudge) (2003)
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Megumi Okina, Misaki Ito, Misa Uehara, Yui Ichikawa

The Grudge (2004)
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Ted Raimi, Ryo Ishibashi

hey kid - it’s not nice to stare

The Japanese horror movie sensation Ju-on (subtitled: The Grudge), having been recently remade in America, isn’t even the first movie in the original series - it’s the third - and I, for one, am totally baffled by all of it. The only grudge here is the one I am holding against the people who suggested I watch this insanely dull and unscary piece of cultural Zeitgeist.It seems that Ringu has had more influence than I thought, but something tells me that Ringu represents a genre that’s a one trick pony. Ju-on also gives us a dead kid, apparently killed violently and turned into a ghost, but we are never clear on the circumstances of his death, except that it involves a feline somehow. (Sometimes the kid screeches like a cat). As far as I can make out, he haunts his old house, then follows people around, kills them somehow, and then they become ghosts, and the whole thing begins again. The entire movie functions on this concept, as we are introduced to varying sorts of characters, all who undergo the same fate. By the time the third victim falls, one starts to feel ripped off. The movie is just like its featured haunted house - a man outside shouts enthusiastically about all the frights that lie therein but all you really get is people jumping out at you from the darkness, a fake corpse here and there, and finally, a dude with a chainsaw chasing you out, right into the gift shop.

“Just how many Ju-on movies are there??”

Don’t misunderstand me - a movie doesn’t have to have a complicated plot to be good horror. It doesn’t even have to make logical sense (and many scenes in Ju-on do not). But it does have to be scary and/or keep my attention. Spooky eyes wide open with white makeup - not scary. A dead woman slowly crawling down the steps while making strange noises - not scary. The film is an extremely long setup with little payoff, and the characters involved are so illogical in their actions that I could never accept them as real. If a ghost is coming at you, why sit there and stare at it? (see: any Fulci film). Why jump into bed and pull the covers over your head? Who knows? Ju-on is populist tripe made to scare 13 year old girls and their mothers who, let’s face it, aren’t exactly discriminating.

more scary “looking”

When a movie like this fails in the fright department, the rest falls apart. By the time the film ends, we are nowhere closer to understanding the whys of the piece than we were at the beginning. There is a sense at one point in the movie that the “grudge” may indeed be some sort of plague that could decimate the entire population of Tokyo. Now that would have held my interest. But the movie is too interested in showing the different ways that you can say “boo” to a person - perhaps scary the first time but an hour later it’s mere annoyance.

A Scene from the Original or the Remake?
The Loser receives both films.

And what can be said about a Hollywood remake that doesn’t do anything different? The American version of The Grudge is nothing but Ju-on with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the leading role. It’s practically duplicated shot-for-shot (they didn’t even bother to change the setting from Tokyo), which means everything that’s wrong with the first film is perfectly copied for our displeasure. Same director(Shimizu), same screeching kid (Yuya Ozeki), same security footage, same elevator scene, same lack of any sense or thrills. I know Americans hate subtitles and all, so why does this film have them? What I am saying is - why bother to reshoot? Just repackage the original movie with English opening titles. Bill Pullman is decent for the small role he was given and Ted Raimi does a bit part (somebody needs to tell brother Sam to quit encouraging/executive producing these things) but there’s nothing else to be said about the picture - that’s how dull it is. Both movies are interchangeable - see the original or see the clone, it doesn’t matter. At the end you’ll still wonder how you got suckered into watching another rehashed Japanese ghost story that was played out years ago. Between this, Ring, and Dark Water remakes, I’m wondering if Hollywood has any originality left these days. The same might be said of Japanese cinema - it seems Shimizu has been tapped for the American Grudge 2 and the Japanese Ju-on 3. Well, at least he’s consistent. - Bill Gordon

Cruel Intentions

“Wow! It’s Lone Starr, in my bedroom!”

Ju-on and The Grudge are available at Amazon: