Korean actress
Seong Hyeon-ah has been presented with a Best Actress award from the 10th Malaga International Fantastic Film Festival in Spain, which ran from November 8-15. She was awarded for her role in the horror film "
Cello".
The honor marks the first festival award received by Seong, who has previously appeared in such films as "Woman is the Future" of Man by
Hong Sang-soo and "Time" by ...
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[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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MoreA record 11 Korean features will be shown in the official selection of this years 9th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) to take place June 17th to the 25th. Among them
PARK Jin-pyo's 2005 film You Are My Sunshine will run in the official competition section for the Jin Jue Award. Another Korean film,
Jo Chang-ho's The Peter Pan Formula has been selected as a candidate for the Asian New Talent Award.
Two Korean directors
KWAK Gyeong-Taek (
Friend, "Typhoon") and
BONG Joon-ho (...
MoreBy Philip Dorsey Iglauer
Cars are nearly as dangerous as musical instruments in "
Cello," billed as this summer's last silver screen scream.
Where usually character development or plot is used to thrill or spook, the summer's horror flick finale tries to invoke screams through deafening bursts of horror movie music by
Lee Han-na. Though the some scenes caused a jolt, or were at times shocking, genuine horror movie shrieks never came.
In the not-so-scary "
Cello," evil seems to lack a will to kill, because aside from a tenuous revenge motive, the murdering musical instrument is pretty much without a purpose. Yes, it is true. In the horror movies it shouldn't really matter, but this one took too many liberties with the genre.
"
Cello" is the unintentional third in this Summer's shock-horror trinity of possessed inanimate objects _ "...
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