A chi-chi private high school, which actively encourages cutthroat competition among the student body by, for instance, publicly displaying their exam score rankings, selects twenty elite members and organizes a boot camp of sorts, to prepare for an international student exchange event. To their chagrin, the students, including rebellious heroine Ina (the singer Nam Gyu-ri), her timid best buddette Myong-hyo (Son Yeo-eun) and her wannabe-boyfriend Hyun (the sit-com idol Kim Beom), and the teachers, uptight English teacher So-young (Yoon Jeong-hee, TV’s Happy Woman) and popular Korean instructor Chang-wook (Lee Beom-soo, City of Violence) find themselves stuck inside the school. Somebody is kidnapping students one by one, in the order of their midterm score ranks, and killing them. The gruesome ways in which they die are broadcast via the school AV system: the only way to prevent the hideous murders is to find correct solutions to the culprit’s “exam questions” in time.

Death Bell Death Bell is the only Korean horror film opening in the 2008 summer season. As an avid fan of horror genre, I would have loved to report to you that it handily overcomes bad word of mouth and production troubles and single-handedly restores the faith in K-horror. Not a chance. It instead partakes of what is surely the ugliest trend of North American cinema in recent years: Death Bell is, to put it succinctly, torture porn for the Whispering Corridors set. As such, it might actually develop some (unwelcome) reputation among the “Extreme Asian Cinema” constituency outside Korea: it pulls no punches in graphically displaying young high school boys and girls (mostly girls) burned and asphyxiated by candle-wax, drowning in a transparent fish bowl, and, in one girl’s case, tumble-cleansed in a washing machine with dozens of razor blades embedded in her skin. Cheerful stuff, eh?

Death Bell is the brainchild of one Yoon Hong-seung, who prefers to be known as CHANG a la Charlie’s Angel’s McG, and had previously directed music videos for such luminaries as BoA, GOD and SG Wannabe (Am I spelling the names of these epitomes of musical sophistication and creativity correctly?). CHANG’s direction is not particularly awful, but the screenplay he authored with Kim Eun-kyung (Meet Mr. Daddy) is a fetid mess. The “exam questions” the culprit comes up with will strike most viewers as either hopelessly arcane or ridiculously complex: the blase cartoon graphics inserted to illustrate the “questions” are no help. Quite a few viewers have already pointed out just how unconvincing the flick’s central premise is: that twenty-some students could be so completely isolated from the outside world?even though their cell phones have been taken away in the beginning? so that the murderer could do them in one by one. On the other hand, the inevitable “surprise twist” does not, thankfully, opt for yet another variation on Tale of Two Sisters (The movie, though, opens with Ina graphically menstruating on screen, in a shameless reference to the former), so the filmmakers get some puny credit for that.

Aside from cute-puppy antics of the lead youngsters, the film’s weight is carried on the shoulders of the excellent character actor Lee Beom-soo. His goggle-eyed, broad performance is nonetheless solidly anchored in the earth and he almost sells us the climactic crazy-dumb “revelation” about his character. Note the emphasis on “almost.”

Death Bell annoyingly combines prettified, slick visual filmmaking (but with no real depth) and gag-inducing torture porn excesses: it’s simultaneously tepid and lackluster on the one hand and gross and offensive on the other. Recommended only for the fans of Lee Beom-soo and very undiscerning fans of the horror film genre.

Source:Koreanfilm