Death Bell (2008)

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I gave this film seven stars for the above average special effect they are using for an Asian movie. Normally, Asian movie are on pretty tight budget, I believe this movie received more investment than some others. The main actress is a singer turned actor, this is usually a disastrous move for western entertainment world but it does happen very often in Asian and she actually did a good job. Asian horror movies very frequently use young, innocent girl as main actress and she is perfect for that role. I must say, it works better than Western sexual appealing actresses. Most white girls are pretty tall and strong but with good body; I really think sometimes if they serious want to fight back, the bullies will get pounded.Anyway, those young school girls and boys were as helpless as always but the only thing will work in this movie was their brain. Now another eastern culture people need to understand is that grades are everything; getting into good university is everything. There is something implied in the movie is about how those students were best students of the school and they have a bright future because they study hard and smart. Quite a few movies implies how stressful of the eastern education is and some writer thinks it is scary if he adds horror element on top of that stress will attract Audience. Based on the experience of the school in the UK, I really don't think English students will ever get it. Well, if you can think of it this way, you are fighting into the night after 1am in the morning trying to compete with one hundred thousands other students in the exam and there is a ghost start bothering you and try to rip your gut out, I think people will get disturbed by it.By the way, I have seen way much more disturbing movies than it, so I am kinda numb. However, I thought among all the Korean horror movies, they do have some new ideas involving some psychological traps and supernatural activities. I liked the singer-actor small girl, it is refreshing to see a pure school girl for a change than teen-model wannabes getting slashed. Worth a watch if you want to see something different. The movie is not that smart, direction was OK, story is fine if you are patient, please don't expect too much acting in a horror movie, in which I mean it is good enough. Try to get a friend grew up from Eastern Asian environment, you might enjoy this movie more if you know our culture.

This is supposed to be a horror movie but it's not really scary. It has some suspense however which can make it worth watching and it's more like a gory slasher similar to "Scream" than a ghost story. Having said that I'm not excluding any ghostly presence in the movie. It's simply up to you to find out. The actors are good, at least the main characters but the rest is just average.The big disappointment comes later in the movie when the director is trying to tie everything together. The script just fails to make a trustworthy impression and you are suddenly very aware that you are only watching a movie when the characters starts behaving in weird ways and doesn't act at all how you would expect them to in their current situation.Unexpected events are good in horror movies but not in this case, where it's only confusing but like I said in the beginning, the suspense is there so it's not really a bad movie.

Seeing how this movie did so well in Korean box office, I thought it would be pretty good. It's not really a horror flick, but sort of works like the "Saw" movies except not the victims but the students that still hasn't been kidnapped yet has to solve the puzzles in order to save there classmate. My guess is that there wasn't many Korean horror movies released during that year, and since Asians tends to crave horror flicks it did so well. Although the premise is pretty well done, none of the characters seem to stand out much and you just don't care who lives and who dies. None of them were believable and the character decisions don't make sense sometimes, there just isn't any logic. Plus everything about this movie seems to be rushed, especially the ending, the twist also wasn't that shocking or original. But what annoyed me the most was the cliché, it's safe to be in one area but a person can take it anymore or goes off to investigate when the person they leave behind is the one that really needs help, which tends to get annoying since it gets used way too much in this. Although I ain't really looking forward to the sequel to this, I hope it's better than this although sequels tend to suck.5.3/10

For those of you who like Korean horror, and who doesn't these days, there is certainly no real shortage. And Korean horror seems to have perfected the balance between the supernatural and the psychological. And the two often go hand in hand. Death Bell is a slightly more genre take on this sort of horror. It also borrows heavily from western horror films, most notably the SAW series. I would imagine this "torture porn" is something Koreans don't get a lot of, while in the US, we're plenty used to it. So, it's hard to look at this film through the eyes of its intended audience. Even so, Death Bell is entertaining enough, but descends into territory that is both too familiar and too cliché, even by Asian horror standards.For the uninitiated, Death Bell tells the story of a group of top-notch students who have been chosen to study over their vacation in order to take a test and impress a sister school. The best students in the school are chosen, but it is to their unfortunate fate. Soon, a sadistic killer traps them in the school and starts kidnapping them one by one. Each kidnapped student is then threatened with a torturous death unless the rest of the students can solve the questions being given to them by the killer.Once the film starts going, it does very much resemble the formula of SAW. Person is taken and put in some kind of trap, other person has to solve some kind of problem to free trapped person, if not person is brutally killed. And Death Bell certainly does this end well enough. The traps aren't as creative as we have come to expect from SAW, but they are creative enough, ranging from a clothes dryer to a candle wax trap. They provide a good amount of tension and there is a pretty decent mix of Korean horror elements mixed in, most notably the presence of a supernatural force.The acting is very good, with Beom-su Lee of City of Violence fame doing a particularly good job. The directing is also quite good. First time director Yoon Hong-Seung does a good job at building tension and mystery, and it is an impressive debut that successfully melds traditional western slasher conventions with Korean horror elements. Production is of the highest quality here. However, despite these elements, it still remains a mostly passable effort.The thing that really brings this down is the script. It's cliché ridden, both for western horror and eastern. There's scary ghost girls, obvious twists, and the attempts at pulling at heart strings, even though you can't help but feel emotionally detached from these characters. It might simply be a cultural barrier, something we can't really understand in what is a truly horrible academia nightmare. Still, halfway through the film, you simply stop caring. It just isn't that interesting anymore. By the time you learn the truth, it's not surprising, nor that interesting. Part of that problem comes from an over-complication of the films story. Elements used are unnecessary. If the film had been kept to a simple, entertaining horror piece, it might have worked all the way through.I rated it the way I did because of this. Everything else was top notch, and there was even quite a bit of tension, mostly during the torture scenes. But once it starts getting complicated, then it fizzles. It could have been better, and Yoon shows great potential for a sophomore effort. I'll even say that this film was very impressive as a first. But on it's own, it's merely a one-night piece of entertainment.