[DVD Review] Listless spook show is a typical post-'Ring' Asian horror flick
Kyu Hyun Kim (qhyunkim)
"
Cello" is a typical example of the lugubriously underwhelming horror films flooding Korean theaters every summer season. The first decade of 21st century has seen an out-and-out flourishing of Korean horror films, once a vilified and ignored genre. A few among them, like "
A Tale of Two Sisters" and "
Memento Mori", beautiful, mysterious and emotionally engaging, have attained the status of minor classics. Others, including "
Into The Mirror", "
The Uninvited", "
R-Point" and "Voice" ("
Voice Letter") have experimented with a mixture of genres, refinement in techniques and style, or infusion of art-house sensibilities, winning praise among critics and support among more patient viewers. And then there are the rest: the hopelessly cliched and listlessly non-frightening, which still constitute, unfortunately, the numerical majority.
There are many reasons for this state of affairs. Since the global triumph of the Ring franchise, the East Asian horror market has been infected, SARS-like, by a cinematic virus known as PSC, i.e. Pointless Sadako Clone. Infection by this virus results in the eyeless young female ghosts with long, straight black hair shuffling around and popping up everywhere. Suzuki Koji's original novel is a quasi-Lovecraftian dark fantasy with overtones of science fiction, in which the content of the "cursed videotape" turns out to be a new form of life, capable of replicating itself through media technology. In the novel, Sadako is a beautiful, hermaphroditic super-being, rejected by society as a freak and a subject of male sexual persecution.
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