DOLL MASTER

With Hollywood's recent cannibalisation of Eastern horror, it might seem just that Jeong Yong-Ki's DOLL MASTER does a bit of borrowing of its own. Maintaining the vengeful spirit notion that has permeated the genre, the film eschews the technological baggage of THE PHONE and THE RING cycle, but fails to do its own source justice. Pillaging the works of Lucio Fulci, this diverting Korean film looks the part, but fails to follow through with any real meat as regards content.

In the mid-twentieth century, a besotted man creates a doll for the woman he loves. Made in her image, it learns to love its maker and kills its living likeness out of jealousy. Blamed for murder, the man is killed by a mob of four vengeful men. After being dispatched, the descendents of the quartet are also placed under a curse.

Some fifty years later, sculptress Hae-Mi (Kim Yu-Mi), photographer Jung-Ki, troubled Young-ha and schoolgirl Sun-young are invited to a doll gallery run by the shifty Jin-Wan (Chun Ho-Jin), so that the wheelchair-bound Mrs Im (Kim Bo-Young) can make miniature dolls of them. Joined by the uninvited Tae-Sung - who claims to be a male model - each person has a macabre doll in their bedroom.

Unnerving events soon take over, when Young-ha suffers a breakdown and Hae-Mi spots a girl resembling her childhood doll roaming the grounds. When the four realize that they are the descendents of the murderers, they are trapped in the building and picked off one-by-one by the longhaired mannequins attached to the walls that act as a conduit for an ancient force.

Kicking off in THE BEYOND territory, with its stylishly monochrome lynching sequence, director Yong-Ki uses Fulci's best films as visual inspiration but fails to sustain these links with any real meaning. Preferring THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY for its present day scenes, Yong-Ki's camera juxtaposes scenery-caressing tracking shots with static work on the shallow-focus lens. Often separating background from the foreground by blurring it out, this technique merges the concrete with the intangible, and stands as a kind of luscious tribute to the stellar work of Sergio Salvati (Fulci's brilliant cinematographer). They even seem to have got the stain glass windows and wallpaper right! Skilful lighting throws the decaying scenery into contrasts of soft yellows and stark blacks, but much of the similarities begin and end visually.

(Interestingly, THE PHONE, another Korean film, borrows a scene from Mario Bava's SHOCK. SHOCK and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY are both scripted by Dardano Sacchetti.)

As good as it looks, DOLL MASTER slips up in several areas. If viewers will glean satisfaction when the photogenic crew get sticky, sweaty and harassed, the film suffers from a standard trapped-in-a-haunted-house scenario and some crudely drawn characters. Most grating is schoolgirl Sun-young, who appears to have been played by a much older actress (Ka-Yeong Lee). Her constant eating of a tube of Pringles is a ham-fisted and ludicrous attempt to convince us as to her youth. Indeed, the way she introduces herself ("I'm in secondary school, I'm really sweet") is a howler. Protagonist Hae-Mi capably makes the transition from cuteness to rigid terror on her versatile face, however, and one or two of the set pieces are quite intense.

Style enhances one of the more unnerving sequences, when a ghastly doll spies on Young-ha from behind her bedroom window. The hazy background image heightens the ethereal mood in a manner that team Fulci specialised at for a short time in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, this is wasted on the by-the-books WAXWORK set-up, which fails to do much with it. Sun-young's immaturity is, however, used productively. When the group stick together, she wanders off in a desperate bid for the lavatory, where a doll attached to the toilet seat folds her body the wrong way! When Hae-Mi has to tear her hand from a handcuff later on, she treats her body as an object, thus paralleling herself to Mina who kills via the dolls littered around the building. Mina, who turns out to be Hae-Mi's old doll, draws on the character of May in Fulci's HOUSE (May, a young girl, is first seen as a mannequin in Fulci's most polished film).

While HOUSE alternated lustrous gore, sustained tension and an unbearable sense of loss, DOLL MASTER stoops to sentiment. The humanising of Mina is as crude a gesture as James Cameron's attempts to make us love Arnie in T2. Lucio Fulci was never shackled by such niceties.

Extras include a 45-minute making of documentary, taking us behind the scenes (lighting, camerawork, the dolls); five minutes of deleted scenes, most of which are slow dialogue snippets; an interview with Baek-Kyoung Sook, maker of the film's dolls, who discusses how the sombre nature of the dolls contributes to the film. A nine-minute make-up featurette stacks this disk further, and we get the usual assortment of trailers. While offering good value, it would have been far more interesting if the parallels with HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY were discussed; a lot of effort as gone into replicating images and designs from that great film..

Review by Matthew Sanderson