|
Epitaph
contains three dark love stories that take place
in a hospital in South Korea 1941. A young man is forced
to work the night shift at the morgue and falls in love
with the dead body of a beautiful girl who has just
arrived at the hospital. Meanwhile, a little girl is
rushed into the emergency room after having miraculously
survived a car accident in which both of her parents
died. This hospital is filled with terror and everyone
who works there will sound find out why...
Epitaph is the final South Korean horror flick that we
review this year and concludes the disappointing South
Korean horror summer of 2007. This is a movie filled
with potential but just like the rest of them, it ends
up falling flat. Epitaph tries SOOO hard to be
unpredictable and come up with new and inventive twists
that it stumbles and falls more than once over its own
confusing-ness. In the end of the movie, I didn't know
what I had just seen since basically nothing made
sense. I had mixed up all the characters and didn't
know who was who anymore, I had mixed up the stories
and didn't understand what was going on at all, this
was a very uneven horror movie to say the least that
failed to create a red line throughout the movie,
even though it so desperately tried.
Despite all of this, I'm naturally going to do my best
to try to explain what the movie was really about, but
I have to warn you, it's not going to be easy, and
just like the movie, I'm probably going to stumble and
fall a couple of times before I'm done. Epitaph is
basically an anthology that takes place in a modern
hospital in 1941 where horror is always just around
the corner. The first story revolves around a doctor
intern called Jung-Name who is forced to work the night
shift at the morgue where the corpse of a beautiful
young woman has just arrived. He's mesmerized by the
beauty of the woman and feels an awkward attraction
to her. This segment was extremely slow-paced and
I was close to falling asleep more than once. Perhaps
that's why I didn't really care once the horror finally
kicked in. Even though the segment had an original and
fun twist, I didn't really care since I had all ready
lost all of my interest in the segment.
Without any warnings, this segment quickly ends and
the movie starts focusing on a young girl named Asako
who's the sole survivor of a car accident in which
her parents died. She soon starts having morbid visions
of ghosts haunting her and it seems as if terror awaits
her behind every corner. This was clearly the best of
the segments but unfortunately the thread between the
first two segments was too thin and I never really got
the connection between the two. Furthermore I didn't
like the fact that they tried hard to make up for
the slow first segment by putting in scares everywhere
in this second segment. This made the entire experience
extremely uneven and it simply wasn't a pleasant movie
to sit through.
Finally it was time for the third segment, which might
have a good pace and all but makes no sense at all and
really put the final nail in the coffin for this flick
as a whole. This time it's about a married couple
who have just returned from Japan when a series of
killings start to occur around the hospital. This one
is so confusing with one twist after the other that it
ruined the entire movie experience for me. And when the
segment was finally over and done with, they tried to
patch all three segments together so that it would feel
like each segment had something to do with each other,
which they fail miserably at.
Epitaph is as uneven as they get - in every department.
The movie occasionally looks stunning with beautiful
cinematography while in other scenes it can look awfully
low-budget and technically inferior to most theatrical
horror movies. I'm guessing that it would be better
after a second view but I'm not going to bother since
I simply didn't enjoy the film very much. A rather weak
contribution from South Korea and I hope that they
bring us some better material to work with next summer.
Some stabbings.
Obviously inspired by the score from "A Tale Of Two
Sisters", the soundtrack was sleek with beautiful
piano music, brilliant strings and creepy flute music.
It did however feel a bit TOO copied from "Sisters".
Disappointing horror movie which stumbles more than
once due to its confusing story. Most of the movie
doesn't make any sense at all and I'm sure that the
first segment will put many of you to sleep. I wouldn't
waste my time on this if I were you, no matter how
much you like Asian ghost stories.
|
|
