The Cut / Cadaver

((summary taken from asianmediawiki.com))

 In a cold dark shaded anatomy classn room, 6 student prosectors are taking part in anatomy class Sun-hwa, Ki-bum, Joong-suk, Eun-joo, Ji-young and Kyung-min are smart medical college freshmen in the same anatomy class. Sun-hwa smart and confident; Ki-bum born to be a team leader full of confidence, Joong-suk son a hospital owner; Kyung-min too weak to be a doctor; Ji-young sexy and haughty but poor at study, Eun-joo studious nerd. They are competing with each other to be the best surgeon, but are strongly tied with fellowship as a team. In the first class, they try to suppress their fear and approach the cadaver that is waiting for them…. The first meeting with a deadly beautiful cadaver, and their nightmare begins. The cadaver is assigned to them, right after the first class. They suffer from ghosts and hallucinations. After several accidents and death of some team members, they start to realize something horrible is coming for them. They do their best to survive and find one clue: these accidents all have something to do with the female cadaver.

Capital Scandal (16 Episodes)

(EPISODE 01-16)

((summary taken from dramawiki))

This drama is set in the 1930's when Korea was under the rule of Japan. Na Yeo Kyeong was the owner of a book store and she was also a freedom fighter. Seon Woo Wan was the playboy son of a rich family and he became involved in the independence movement through a bet with his co-workers to win Na Yeo Kyeong's heart. His father paid for the education of his worker's son, Lee Soo Hyeon, and was disappointed to find him working for the Security Branch of the Japanese government. Cha Song Joo was a famous gisaeng who ran a high class brothel.

Muoi: The Legend of A Portrait

((summary taken from AsianMediaWiki))

 Yoon-hee, a novelist, desperately seeks for a new story and that’s when she hears from Seo-yeon, her friend in Vietnam, a very tempting story about a legend of Muoi’s portrait. A long time grudge makes Yoon-hee hesitate to go to Vietnam to meet Seo-yeon. However, fascinated by sources of the portrait Seo-yeon incessantly sends her, Yoon-hee heads for Vietnam to unveil a century-long legend of the portrait. Yoon-hee is stunned by Seo-yeon’s dazzling look never seen before but is readily welcomed by her friend. As Yoon-hee unveils the mystery of Muoi, Vietnam, seemingly an exotic place, turns into a setting of a living nightmare, and the secret of Muoi in buried as if never to be revealed.

Love So Divine

((summary taken from AsianMediaWiki))

A young priest falls in love with a chic young woman! Not the typical plot for a romantic comedy (especially by Western standards), this one finds a young Catholic priest having a difficult time choosing between his religious calling and the charms of a sexy parishioner. Yu (Kwon) is a serious young man who has always worked towards his life ambition... to serve God as a Catholic priest. When he gets assigned to a small church in rural Korea, Kyu meets the Pastor's niece, Bong-Hee who has just come back from the United States... You know what happens next.

Secret

((summary taken from AsianMediaWiki))
Lun (Jay Chou) lives with his father, Chiu (Anthony Wong), the music teacher of Tamkang Secondary School. Both of them are very good at music and piano. This is the first day Lun admitted to Tamkang Secondary School. When he walks through the campus with his classmates, a mysterious piano solo draws his attention. He follows the song and finds that an ethereal girl is playing piano in the old music room.

The piano girl is Yu (Guey Lun-Mei), one of Lun's classmates. She is always late for school and hence sits next to Lun at the back row. The two become intimate friends and spend a lot of time together. "What's the melody you played the first day we met?" asked Lun, "That's my secret." Yu whispered in his ear.

As the graduation day approaches, Yu decides to tell Lun her secret...

Prince Turns to Frog (30 Episodes)

(EPISODE 01-30)

((summary taken from azntv))

  Prince Who Turns To Frog / 王子變青蛙 / Wang Zi Bian Qing Wa

The fairy tale goes... After the princess kissed the frog, it turned into a handsome prince and they lived happily ever after...

Yeah...right.

When you visit a little town called Guan Mei, you may meet Ye Tian-Yu (Chen Qiao En). At first glance, she may seem as a shameless, money-grubbing, deceiving little schemer. And when you meet her family at their little grocery store called "Qian Lai Ye" (Money c'mon in), you will find the shameless, money-grubbing, deceiving little schemer trait runs in the family. But, please don't prejudge them. They are actually very kind-hearted townsfolk, as Shan Jun-Hao (Ming Dao) finds out when he gets involved in a mysterious car accident and loses his memory.

Okay, fine. The accident is not so accidental.

Shan Jun-Hao is a general manger of Senwell Hotel, in which his family owns 60% of the shares. His cold-hearted, cut-throat management style pisses quite a lot of people inside and outside of the hotel. So on the day of his engagement to his childhood friend, Fan Yun-Xi (Zhao Hong Qiao), he gets kidnapped. Not someone who takes it lying down, he fights for the control of the kidnapping car. The car crushes into a side railing and falls down a cliff. Luckily, he survives the crash and manages to climb back up onto the highway. Unfortunely, he is immediately hit by an oncoming car and knocked unconscious.

And, who hit him? A little hint: The guilty party takes him home, finds out his memory is lost (Hence, not remembering who he is, and most importantly, not remembering she hit him), and recruits him to work in her family grocery store.

Whispering Corridors

Ahh, the movie that started it all. Normally, I probably would have been blown away by the unique and awesome-ness of this movie... but seeing as how I watched this entire series backwards, I was less impressed with this one as I was with most of the sequels it spawned.

The power of this particular horror movie, however, is the fact that it eventually ends up making sense. So often, in these type of movies, the ending is ambiguous or confusing, or just plain stupid. Here it is neither. The twist is actually pretty creative, and hard to figure out... especially since the director tries a lot of different things in order to make sure it comes off as a surprise. And there are enough moments (though there could always be more) that had me jumping in my seat. The girls at this school (as opposed to, say, Memento Mori) are actually interesting and broad enough to keep the viewers interest. None of them come off as carbon copies of the others, and seem very... normal. Typical high schoolers you could find in just about any school.

And again, we are shown very evil, almost sadistic teachers, which almost seems to be a theme in this particular series. If this is the way Korean schools were/are run, then something definitely needs to be done... no wonder so many dead-students come back as ghosts... heck, I'd be pissed too!

And yet... I still wasn't overly impressed with it. I had very high expectations going in which may have ruined it for me... and some of the effects were cheesy and overly-common by today's horror-movie standards. But if you normally get scared easily, and go into this one not expecting much, then you may actually end up liking it a lot. It's a decent horror movie (and not just because of the ghost-killings) so I can see why it inspired many others of this genre... but in the end, it's semi-forgettable, and has trouble measuring up to its sequels. At least in my opinion... which, again, doesn't say much.

My Rating:

Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori

I have to say… honestly, this was my least favorite out of all the movies in this series. It was a decent watch, but as far as terror/horror/chills went, it was extremely low. For once, it seems they were more interested in developing/explaining the story, than making a movie that’s scary—and frankly, the story wasn’t even that interesting. It was confusing and hard to follow (like all of these usually are, lol) and the motivation for the girl haunting the school was really lame.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this movie: it wasn’t scary, the story was boring, and there were many unlikable characters—(what kind of teachers do they have at this school, anyway?!)—and there’s only one death throughout the whole thing! And despite an interesting premise (I LOVE the idea of the haunted diary) they didn’t use it to its full potential. They focused on the story behind the diary rather than letting the diary unleash horror and mayhem on the students at this school. And one student has it throughout the entire movie, obsessing over it… I wish it would have been passed around, and affected everyone. SOOO disappointing!!!

To give it credit, it does try to tackle an interesting topic that I’m not used to seeing in Korean film—homosexual relationships between female students at an all-girls school. And they portrayed it in an interesting (if not overly disturbing way). But because of this obsessed focus, there was no real, genuine horror… and that’s supposed to be this movie’s staple! This movie would have worked as an independent drama or even a romance... but as a horror movie, I'm sad to say, it just didn't succeed.

I just didn’t find this scary in the least. The third movie in this series was WAY better.

(Though, on another note: it was fun seeing the lead actress from Hello, My Teacher and Let’s Go to School Sang-Doo as a teenager. Plus, I found it funny how her character was known for having a HUGE/unnatural crush on her teacher… which, interestingly enough, is basically how Hello, My Teacher starts, lol. Also, (imo) she looks way better with long hair!)

My Rating:

The Bad Guy

Wow. I’m really not sure what I was expected to take away from this movie. How brutal, twisted, and ugly love can be? Something like that? Whatever the message, I guess I’m an idiot because I had trouble seeing it. And if that was the only message… well, I already knew all that… I certainly didn’t need to watch a girl becoming an unwilling prostitution in order to understand such a thing.

It was hard and disturbing to watch… and I’m afraid I had trouble understanding the motivations for both the main character and the college-girl-turned-hooker… especially towards the end. They were both full of contradictions, so I wasn’t sure which part of their personalities I could believe was ‘real’—if any facets of them were. Perhaps that’s where the two-way mirror comes in—playing with the idea that nobody really knows who they are—that we only see what we want to see. And of course there had to be something about reflections in there—like, when they broke the mirror together, our sense of reality was shifted or reversed, and we were shown an alternate reality where they were happy being ‘bad’—or being bad was ‘good’.

Haha, yeah, I know it’s a HUGE stretch. Plus it sounds shallow and stupid… but my mind is like mush right now... but at least trying to find meaning where there is none, is fun, right?! ;)

The play on the photographs, however, was really intriguing and interesting… especially the way he superimposed the main characters face using the mirror. And the woman with the red dress was a strong visual: I have little doubt in my mind they were headed down the same path as her. After all, no story like this could possibly end happily, right?

…Right???

What it comes down to though, is that I’m not really sure what I should be taking away from this movie—what I should feel.

Disgusted? Angry? Annoyed? Disturbed? Pity?

Well, at least it got me thinking and questioning things… that’s a vast improvement over my initial reaction. But I still think it was lacking something: I wasn’t blown away like with Crocodile or 3 Iron. But I guess the film wasn’t too “bad”… (haha, yay for crappy puns). In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think there’s more to the plot than my simple mind is able to comprehend.

At least I hope there is… otherwise, this was nothing but a glorified porno with an abundance of mirror motifs. =P

My Rating: