The 8th Night (non-spoiler) Review

Did I hate The 8th Night? No. Did I love it? Also no.

The 8th Night is the story of Park Jin Soo (Lee Sung Min), a former monk who has been summoned to help rid the world of a centuries-old demon that has been reawakened. He is joined by a monk Cheong Seouk, played by Nam Da Reum.

I’m having a hard time trying to review this movie because while I didn’t think it was a bad movie, and could see how a lot of people would connect, I didn’t find it really that memorable. 8th Night is weird in that the first quarter of the movie is set up more like an adventure action movie, as the artifact is found and the monks tell the stories voiced over graphics. It doesn’t give you a sense of where the movie is going, or even where it’s trying to go. I was left in this weird state of confusion because we really weren’t doing much of anything.

Not only does the story take a while to actually progress, it also takes a while for it to be scary. And by a while - save a few instances of weird faces - the only horror you get out of the movie is in the last 20 minutes. With not much build-up or tension, the movie falls flat as a horror. Trailers are a notoriously terrible judge on what the movie is going to be, and this movie was no exception. There is no tension during the first hour or so because most of it is unnecessary, drawn-out plot. It spends most of its time focusing on the stories, but doesn’t really need any of that exposition to understand what is going on or even take the story to where it needed to go. It’s the movie’s major flaw.

Don’t go into it thinking the movie you are seeing in the previews is the movie you receive. I wanted a bit more intrigue and better pacing, and a lot more horror than was presented in the movie. The fact that most of those things only appeared in about the last 20 minutes of a two-hour movie was too much work for not a lot of payoff. In the end, it fell flat and uninteresting. I was really hoping for a lot more than this.

If you have a free two hours, or like backstory-heavy slow exorcism movies watch this, but I’d skip it if I didn’t have the free time.

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#Alive (Non-Spoiler) Review

So zombie movies aren’t something I always gravitate towards. Not because I hate them or that they freak me out. It’s just that I feel overwhelmed with them because the zombie subgenre is just so…overpopulated with them. Especially now, it just feels like if there is some sort of monster-type entity it’s going to be some variation of a zombie. And as a creature-feature lover, I’m always hoping that the big bad is going to be something other than just zombies. I get it, it’s something that’s super easy to grasp (especially now), and it can create more of a connection than some other monster. So last year when Netflix announced that they would be picking up the movie #Alive, I was excited that it would be accessible and easy to watch, I just wasn’t so excited for it that I had to watch it exactly when it dropped. That is why we’re here, almost a year later, finally watching it. And I wish I hadn’t waited.

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#Alive follows Oh Joon Woo (portrayed by Yoo Ah In) who wakes up one day while his family is on vacation to a zombie outbreak. Joon Woo, trapped in an apartment without much food and water, has to figure out how to survive alone. One day, he meets another survivor (Park Shin Hye) in the apartment across the street from his.

For a zombie movie, the movie largely spends most of its time not really focusing on the zombies. I mean, it kinda does. They are always present, but they aren’t the real focus. The movie was much more of a survival horror film that had a zombie outbreak, than an action zombie film. From despair, hopelessness, and dwindling resources, survival lies in continuing on when all is lost more than the fear of the zombies. Between the real stages of grief that the characters go through, and the real-life survival problems that arise during, I found it a lot more enjoyable and different than other zombie films I’ve seen.

You probably know by now that I kind of have a thing for the silence. I love the mundane slices of life. This usually translates into liking things that most people find boring and I do think that this movie might have that problem with some of the audience that watches it. There’s real loneliness for a good chunk, and most of the time it’s just Joon Woo in the apartment. Park Shin Hye’s character doesn’t even enter until over thirty minutes in. He doesn’t fight a lot of zombies, most of the time we only see them below from the window of his apartment. For me, this is what worked. I liked that it focused more on the reality of a zombie outbreak. Probably due to the world we’re currently in, I felt more of a connection to what the character was doing and the real horror living in the despair of the unknown more than anything else. I liked that they showed him being concerned for his family, the little notes he left around to keep up his spirits. The video diaries he did, and the passing of time doing the things he loved like playing video games. It felt more real, and was easier to connect with.

I wanted to keep this movie review spoiler-free, so I can’t really go into detail about some of my other favorite parts of the movie, but I do want to make note of the way that they bridged current day technology with what is going on and how it plays in the greater plot of the movie. It added even more to my enjoyment and more to the real horror. I don’t think they overused aspects of technology that would make it seem unreal. Cell phones were losing signal in and out. One scene we see him desperately trying to find bars just to listen to his parent’s voice mail. There were references to breaks for commercials during the news updates, and random news segments that were more light-hearted that added this light surreal touch that coming off of the year we had is absolutely true. In the beginning, we see him on social media basically pleading the will to go on because he was so lonely and wanted to connect with someone. Instead of the technology being an aid in fighting the zombies, it was focused more on the connection it provided.

If you haven’t watched the movie yet, I would definitely recommend it. While there is a bit of gore when the zombies are feeding, and a few other points, it’s not super gratuitous and a lot lighter in the amount that it happens. If you aren’t into zombie movies because they cause stress, I still wouldn’t recommend it. I think if you spend your time hyper-focused on the zombies and what they are doing (or what they will potentially do) it would be such a disservice to the rest of the movie and focus you in the wrong direction and I don’t think you’d get the same out of it.

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A Tale of Two Sisters Review

This week’s Friday night movie pick was the 2003 classic, A Tale of Two Sisters.

I actually first watched the movie last year because I had found out about its huge impact on Korean horror. The movie is Korea’s highest-grossing horror film and the first to be screened in America. It is consistently in top lists for one of the best films in Asian horror, and resonated a lot with audiences. It has a 2009 remake, The Uninvited, directed by the Guard Brothers.

Written and directed by Kim Jee Woon (A Quiet Family, I Saw the Devil, The Age of Shadows), the film follows Su Mi (Im Soo Jung), a teenager who has just been released from a mental hospital and sent back home with her sister, dad, and her new stepmother. Tensions rise between the girls and their stepmother, and with the constant nightmares of her dead mother, Su Mi is tormented.

Because of the nature of the movie, there really is no way to do any sort of a review/analysis without spoiling some things, so while I might not go over every plot of the story in this review, there will still be major spoilers. I highly suggest watching the movie before reading this or anything about the movie. Some of the plot is a surprise and really adds to the enjoyment of the movie as a whole. This is your warning.

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A Tale of Two Sisters is loosely based on a popular Joseon-era Korean fairy tale The Story of Janghwa and Hongryeon. Following the death of their mother, a father of two girls remarries a woman who does not like the girls and repeatedly abuses them. When the eldest is about to marry, the stepmother sabotages the marriage which exiles the daughter from the family. The mother tells one of her sons to push the daughter into a pond, where she drowns. While she is drowning a tiger comes and attacks the son. The mother gets what she wants with the daughter gone, but at the cost of her son, and becomes violent to the existing stepdaughter and eventually her fate is the same as the other stepdaughter. It isn’t until the girl’s ghosts are able to convince the new mayor of what the stepmother is doing that she is found guilty and sentenced to death. The story ends with the daughter’s spirits being able to rest, and the father remarrying with a new wife, bearing twins.

Still from the 1939 movie based on the fairy tale.

A Tale of Two Sisters has everything I love for a horror movie. I love dark, creepy, atmospheric stories that stay with me. There’s a mystery that is slowly being unfolded and you don’t know what’s going to happen. The tension is from the unknown rather than jump scares or gore.

When I’ve come across people talking about the movie, the biggest plot twist in the movie to them is the reveal that the sister, Su Yeon (Moon Geun Young), is dead. While it does add a great layer of surprise to the movie, I think it is intentionally set up to hold more weight to throw you off from what I believe is the greater twist: when you find out the horrific cause of death of the mother and her sister. When you realize why Su Mi is the way she is it makes the whole story so much more horrific because it’s real. The scare is not her dead mother appearing before her, or a ghost hand grabbing hers. It’s real-life horror that has emotionally ruined her life. Su Mi manifested her sister because she was the only comfort she had, the poor girl didn’t have a chance. Her sister is there the minute she returns to the house after coming back from the hospital. Su Yeon represents the only time that Su Mi was happy and becomes the only way to feel safe. Yet she is also her constant reminder of failure.

When Su Mi is confronted by the realization that her sister is dead, that’s when her mania goes into a tailspin and Su Yeon disappears from her side. The way Su Mi ‘sees’ her stepmother during the scenes of her dragging the bag is the manifestation of her rage and torment and it does such a good job of giving the viewer a greater understanding of what is going on in her head. The movie pulls you around constantly. From believing that the stepmother is really doing everything, to finding out that Su Mi is an unreliable narrator because everything you’ve just seen was her doing, to the realization that the true story is so much worse. It is literally placing you in the torment that Su Mi is actually in. It’s super effective and is probably one of my favorite things about the movie. I was horrified because I was seeing what she was, and it was unsettling.

Another thing that stuck with me from the first time I watched this and again after my rewatch, was the father’s role in everything. In the fairy tale that I talked about above, the father does not have much of a role in the story. He isn’t part of the abuse (the daughters choose not to tell him) but does believe the stepmother over the daughter. In the end, the girl’s spirits come to him to wish him a good life. In the movie, the father does a lot more even when he is shown doing the very least. It’s unsettling to see him interact with Su Mi because he knows that she’s still seeing her dead sister. He refuses to take away the piece of furniture in the house that is the literal cause of everything that happened. He doesn’t acknowledge that he has a greater role in the death of his first wife and his daughter or the mental trauma his eldest has to endure because of it. He has clearly admitted defeat in helping her. It’s a repeat of what he did with his first wife. He left her when she was mentally and physically unwell and moved on. He literally hid her in a closet to die.

A Tale of Two Sisters is a movie that I would recommend to everyone and is a personal favorite. While there are parts of the story that are classically horror, the real horror is in the events that happened in the house. I think it does a good job in combining real horrors with fake, and keeps you guessing the entire way through with great surprises and turns. The story unfolds in such a great way that it left me thinking for a while.

Let me know if you’ve watched the movie as well and your thoughts on it. This second viewing has really solidified my love for it, and I was able to focus on a lot more things that were going on without having to focus on the subtitles.

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White: Melody of Death (non-spoiler) Review

Native Title: 화이트: 저주의 멜로디
Release Date: June 9, 2011
Director: Kim Sun
Writer: Kim Gok
Genre: Horror
Starring: Ham Eun Jung, Hwang Woo Seul. Rest of the cast can be found here.

I have a soft spot for teen slasher films. I’ve been into horror and spooky stuff since I can remember, but around middle school/high school is when I started to get into it more, and those teen slasher movies were it. They are fun, exciting, the right level of gore and campiness and I was living through one of the best times for it. Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty…all premiered when I was a teen. While White: Melody of Death didn’t have the same punch as its Western counterpoints (I’m assuming because of the target audience) it did have some of those same fun elements.

I’ve had this on my list to watch for a really long time - actually most of the movies and dramas I’m going to be talking about in the next couple of months have been on my radar for a while - so it was nice to finally have an excuse to pick this one up now. I knew very little going into the film. I knew that it was about kpop. I knew that Junho had a slight cameo and that it starred the girl from T-ara and that it had this mysterious Ring-vibe to it. But that’s it.

White: Melody of Death is about a kpop group, the Pink Dolls, who are at the brink of dissolving. They are consistently losing on music shows, and only really have one more shot before they will disband. The main leader, Eun Ju (played by T-ara member Ham Eun Jung), finds a video in their new rehearsal space while cleaning up. It’s a grainy recording of a group performing an unfamiliar song. Her manager gets ahold of the tape and decides to use the song for their group, which skyrockets the group into stardom quickly. That’s when the problems start to happen.

One of the parts I liked most about the film was how they used the popularity and the craziness of fans to heighten some of the clips. The horrors and negative aspects of that business were brought up in the film. There were constant portrayals of the fans going nuts, screaming, and trying to grab at the girls - as well as being caught up in their own fandom to not realize the severity of what was going on or to really pick up the danger that the girls were being put in. The juxtaposition of the crazy fans who don’t care about their safety, and the knowledge of what the girls went through to get there was interesting. The constant pressure of the girls to keep going even after things started to go bad added to the real-life horror side of the movie.

I think that at parts the movie was hazy in its execution of this comparison, though. It would have been nicer if they had leaned into the ugly side of the industry a bit more. A lot of it was rushed or we just didn’t get to see it because the entity had to be present again. Issues they bring up such as jealousy, plastic surgery, and just general deception because of the nature of competition were lightly touched on and kind of glossed over and so it never came across as a good enough conflict, or just entirely unresolved. It created a lot of muddling and confusion to the storyline towards the end. You see where they were going, but those problems and pacing throws it off.

I do like what the movie was trying to do, even if they didn’t necessarily get there. If you are a kpop fan already, these parts tend to be more forgivable since you are already in the know of the problems in that industry and understand why it’s there, but if you go in as just a horror fan the context might get lost. In the end, the general horror audience wasn’t its target audience. With the Eun Jung (an actual well-known kpop idol) starring and cameos from other idols, the audience for it was a young kpop audience.

All-in-all I enjoyed the movie for what it was. It was fun, I enjoyed it as someone who spends a lot of time looking into the kpop world, and it wasn’t a bad way to spend a Friday night.

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