DEATH BELL

When what looked like a long-haired female ghost appeared on my screen during the opening scenes of Korean flick Death Bell (2008), I must confess I feared the following ninety-or-so minutes were going to be very long indeed. However, this isn't the straightforward supernatural film it at first appears to be, which is a good thing; Death Bell mashes together a few familiar horror genres, admittedly not in a novel way, but it's an entertaining enough experience. As with a lot of these Far Eastern movies, half the fun comes from spotting the cultural differences, but more on this anon!

It's exam season at a Korean language school and – after we see that Korean student pranks are rather more sophisticated than just scratching teachers' cars – the ghostly form of a young woman appears to one of the students, who is waiting with the others to see his final scores appear on the dedicated screen. He panics, and takes off. This isn't an isolated incident, either, but any paranormal elements are soon joined by a Saw-style scenario. A female student has gone missing, the school has been shut off and – as a voice on the tannoy explains – the remaining students have to answer one more exam, or she, and others, will die...

As the students struggle to solve a series of cryptic clues in order to save their dwindling classmates, they gradually piece together the reasons for why all this might be happening.

The thing which struck me was how the plausibility of this scenario (overt horror elements aside) matched up against stories about schools and/or young people in the West. We have F, and a whole host of killer hoodies. Korean cinema, on the other hand, can craft a tale about deadly exam competitiveness between its young 'uns and you don't get the impression that the filmmakers are being facetious, either! The film itself felt like it was aimed specifically at teenagers; although a lot of horror has a young target audience, here it did feel like teens were expected to relate to the basic issues in Death Bell, as well as the younger characters with their faintly inept teachers. Blood and gore is kept fairly minimal, too. There are, as you might imagine, lots of puzzles here (in Chinese as well as Korean due to the type of school) which may be a bit lost on Western audiences, but the film jogs along fairly steadily and doesn't overstay its welcome.

Of course, for all of this, the film is recycling a lot of overused ideas, albeit in a rather less-used setting than the typical warehouse or houseful of dangerous inbreds we so often find. A lot of what you see has been done elsewhere in recent years, and probably in a more grisly style. Although people do die, this is Saw -lite: Death Bell is competent, but derivative, and doesn't try to out-repel its source material. Because of its source material though, it does suffer from some of the same clichés and pitfalls.

Still, if Korean horror almost inevitably floats your boat, there's already a sequel to look forward to!

Review by Keri O’Shea