The first couple minutes of Nightmare (Gawi, 2000) are set in a lightning-lit morgue as a mortician sews a beautiful corpse's eyes shut. Visualy this had a cheesy creepiness about it, but the film never had a second moment of effectiveness for me. This mediocre South Korean horror film is more or less just a slasher.
A murdered girl whose death was caused to look like suicide has returned as a ghost to avenge herself against the group of college students responsible for her death. But she never really comes off as much of a ghost as her ghost make-up only makes her seem like a moody sexy goth chick.
No supernaturalism was really required for the story's series of murders with minor gore FX. One of the group she is out to kill is himself psychotic, so the film can't even decide on whose the bigger killer.
Given the magic video tape of the Ringu cycle, I thought momentarily that the video "evidence" that surfaces in this story was the same sort of weird-technology thing. But apparently not, though nothing about that tape could actually have been filmed by the characters within the story.
The story is familiar from every "girl gets revenge against everyone" from Carrie to Prom Night, but this time it is done without even an iota of panash. And the last-minute hint of the ghost's lesbianism as part of her evil motivation was eye-rollingly pointless homophobic stupidity.
The acting is largely poor with some less-than-poor moments. The script is tiringly cliche. The time-line with flashbacks is clumsy. The cinematography is occasionally close to adequate. Yet whoever liked the over-rated Japanese film Ju-on (The Grudge) will probably like this one too.
 Reviewed Again Six Years Later:
Gawi or Nightmare is an awfully cliche title whether in English or Korean, to match the cliches its tale embraces. It's a sleek lowkey horror film, but so reliant on overused imagery (however well done) that it took me half an hour to decide whether or not I'd seen this already.
I decided I hadn't seen it before so jotted down a few notes & wrote a review, only to discover I had reviewed it after all. But what the heck, two reviews at long intervals are inevitably very different things.
Kyung-ah (Ha Ji-won) is a pallid girl clinging to her creepy doll, trying to locate Sun-ae (Choi Jeong-yun). Although Kyun-ah is dead of suicide & Seon-ae has run away to escape the ghostly presence, it's only a matter of time before Kyung-ah finds her.
Hung-joon (Yu Ji-tae) walks with a limp because of the girl now dead. He's still bitter, as formerly he had been a school sports hero. His fate, too, is tied up with that of her pursuing spirit.
Female characters are all bland beauties in this tale, the goth-ghost make-up of the dead girl making her the only one who stands out. Male characters project more personality despite that the film's mainly about the young women.
Eunju (Ha Ji-won in a sort-of second role), a strange odd girl, stands out a bit in the flashback sequences of school romance gone awary, & has some telekentic power not much used in the story. The flashbacks are just too dull, though the photography for these scenes is excellent & the editing is fluid, so that slowly we understand why there are ghosts.
Flashback within flashback tells of a girl in a small village believed to be demon-possessed & vengeful. She seems indeed to have been evil, though it could be only because of her maltreatment in life. This alleged village demoness may bring bad luck, due to Eunju, who is either an incarnation of or the same spirit as Kyun-ah.
 When at school she was again blamed for every little tragedy, so she leaps from a high building to escape torment.
Through others' guilt, she becomes the very curse so many thought her to be. These few years later, when some of them have become successful in the world & others not, the ghost begins to kill them one by one.
As the ghost avenges herself, one guy loses an eye, then is cut up by broken glass & then beheaded. Another gets his leg mangled, attacked succubus-like in his dreams, then bashed with a baseball bat which wasn't exactly the ghostliest thing to have happen.
Her suicide may have followed much worse abuse than we yet realize, & the crime against her is on video tape, shades of Ringu once again. Further gore sequences undermine the earnestness of the bad acting, making the film worse rather than better.
But it does get mildly interesting when it begins to seem like Seon-ae may be a psychopath emulating a ghost, but this ultimately only muddied up a story already rather confused. Add a totally ridiculous ghost-cat element & it gets downright laughable.
Alas, this pale demon-girl of Japanese & Korean films, such came to be imitated in American films post-Ringu & its Englished remake, is simply insufficient for a good story. Nightmare is thus slow & boring with periodic ghostly dreams that come off moody but hollow.
Visually it's well done throughout, & the Korean take on "teen horror movies" is better done than in American teens-die movies, but that's not saying much. For storywise it's a derivative mess. When it's all over, with two characters still standing, one of them says, "I'm still confused." A far better script may have resolved her confusion, & ours.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
|
