(2003)
Dir - Kim Sung-ho
Overall: MEH
Loosely remade across the Pacific by Alexandre Aja five years later as Mirrors, Kim Sung-ho's debut Into the Mirror, (Geoul sokeuro), pulls off some clever camera misdirects here or there, but it is otherwise a forgettable and bloated work in supernatural horror. Trying to get unnerving juice out of the concept of reflections, alternate dimensions, or doppelgängers is a tactic that has been around in uncanny fiction even before movies were a thing, but Kim's story here lazily settles on a typical vengeful spirit motif while only haphazardly toying with its more interesting ideas. Yoo Ji-tae makes for a likeable yet flawed protagonist who takes a job at his uncle's mall as chief of security after his legitimate police career came to an end due to a botched hostage shooting. Said mishap involved mirrors because of course it did, which makes the fact that he is now dealing with an unrelated ghost that turns people's reflections against themselves more of a hackneyed coincidence than an ingenious plot device. Overlong by at least twenty or so minutes, Kim lets the pacing slag to its dopey conclusion and even though the film has a consistent and humorless tone, it still fails to impress.
Dir - Lee Woo-cheol
Overall: MEH
The debut Cello from South Korean filmmaker Lee Woo-cheol, (who also penned the screenplay), is a bog-standard vengeful spirit yarn, playing by the rules without offering up any scares that are either inventive or frightening. Centered around a cellist instructor with a mysterious past involving one of her contemporaries that died in a car crash while she was behind the wheel, all of the inevitable twists and turns prove predictable for anyone rightly assuming that there will be twists and turns in the first place. Motifs like a recently arrived and creepy house servant who does not speak, waking nightmares, misleading flashbacks that are shown correctly later on, cryptic phone calls and text messages, hallucinations, characters lying badly, and a déjà vu ending that clearly spells disaster are all nothing new and ergo nothing interesting in the merely competent manner that they are used here. Some of the deaths are nasty and it goes for shock value in the fact that both children and animals are not sparred any supernatural wrath, but it relies too heavily on a stale, jump scare + ominous music = been there/done that framework.
(2006)
Dir - Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Overall: MEH
An adaptation of the Sony video game Siren by prolific television director Yukihiko Tsutsumi, Forbidden Siren, (Siren, Sairen), is a formulaic supernatural outing with few surprises up its sleeve. Set on an isolated island where of course everyone is weird, it has a similar hook inherent in the Silent Hill series where a blaring siren signals some sort of malevolent secret. As opposed to such a noise turning the entire location into a bizarro-world hell dimension, here it merely sets off a lot of wind, shaky handheld camerawork, spastic editing, and the occasional zombied-out local who stumbles around wildly with bloodshot eyes yet otherwise poses zero threat. It follows closely enough to the source material, with a psychological twist that should be easy enough for most viewer's to see coming, yet also one that unavoidably comes off as convoluted and silly. While the jump scares are thankfully left alone, the digital effects are laughably terrible, an incessant and cornball scary music score sets an overbearing atmosphere that kills all potential subtly and mysterious creepiness, plus the aforementioned busy cinematography is more annoying than mood-setting. As far as video game movies go, there are obviously far worse out there, but the humdrum results here are to be expected considering that most films of such an ilk do not come out all that great.
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