Country:
Korea
Recognizable Faces:
Jung-ah Yum
Jin-hee Jee
Directed By:
Jong-Hyuk Lee
Let me tell you a secret. During the first half of this decade, I was into Japanese horror movies a lot. It seemed to me like somebody over there poisoned the waters with a virus that boosted creativity and flushed your inhibitions away. In Korea, Chan-Wook Park has lead the way with his trilogy of psychological crime thrillers that was spearheaded by his international success with Oldboy, who thankfully never received the U.S reboot with Nicholas Cage it was once promised. So over time I learned to trust the Tartan Asia Extreme DVD brand as a seal of quality for fucked up oriental movies. H was in the bargain bin at a street sale last week-end. A Tartan Asian Extreme movie for seven bucks and with that AWESOME cover, how could it go wrong? Well, it did. H is not stupid or ill-intentioned and I would even say that it's somewhat well-shot. But it also happens to be an uninspired piece of shit.
It's another one of those serial killer movies. "Like Se7en meets Silence Of The Lambs" the tagline said. If the main sales point of your film is to refer to the two most canonical examples of the genre, it means that your movie lacks...I don't know,an identity? So Shin-Huyn (Seung-woo Cho) is a dark, sexy and enigmatic serial killer (how original, right?), but he happens to be in already prison when a wave of copy-cat murders start. Horrendous killings of pregnant women, along with their fetus. Detective Kim (Yum) who already had to deal with him in the past and Detective Kang (Jee) are affected to the case, and start playing mind games with a very amused incarcerated killer. If you're telling yourself you've seen this storyline before, it's because you did. Jong-Hyuk Lee rips off Thomas Harris and every thriller writers that decided they also wanted their serial killer to be dark, sexy and mysterious.
What is it with that anyway? Why can't serial killers in movies have a problem in their head? Like Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs? I mean, I get it as a plot device. The serial killer is there to make the protagonist acknowledge his dark side. And by doing just that, the protagonist will have gone through the necessary transformation to solve the twisted riddles of the nemesis. All that is very mythic in structure. But where a movie like The Silence Of The Lambs works, Clarice Sterling incorporates her dark side for a clearer, broader thinking. Hannibal Lecter makes her better at her job and potentially a better human being. That's the scary, twisted part. But in H, that's the part they skipped for the sake of a hard-to-swallow mystery.
That mystery itself is somewhat well-told. The film is wrapped tightly. All the scenes ultimately have their use, even if they look useless and masturbatory on the first viewing. H will require you to watch it several times to fully appreciate it and that's a problem considering I got bored about thirty minutes in. The scenes all have their specific use yes, but some of them are just too long and pack absolutely no tension at all. Character walks in a hallway with music...and walks...and walks...to arrive on the scraps of a scene that already happened. There are some typically oriental gruesome images. But they are cheap and have very little incidence on the storyline. H is trying to get some free shock out of them. What's the point of putting gruesome images in your movie if your plot is purely intellectual? I don't know. H follows the trend of the nineties serial killer movies and doesn't do it with any style, except maybe for that ending who references to Korean culture (something I had to read about). The Asian cinema landscape is so rich that you might want to skip on this one.
SCORE: 40%