Movie time! Death Bell (고사) is illogical torture-porn

When I couldn’t fall asleep earlier,I wasn’t really feeling like watching a long drama series, so I decided to find a movie to watch at mysoju. I started clicking through the synopsi in order to find my movie of the night and discovered an interesting set of movies…

movie 1: Crush and Blush (미쓰 홍당무): There is a Russian teacher that blushes a lot. She falls in love with another teacher. but, wait, he’s married. complications. drama. complications. PASS.

movie 2: Hello Schoolgirl (순정만화): this movie belongs to the always popular “30 year old man falls in love with high school girl” genre. ew. gross. wait, actually, i already watched this one the other week. PASS

movie 3: Death Bell (고사): The twenty best kids in school are stuck in a special saturday session and become trapped and murdered off in sick and twisted fashion according to class rank if they can’t answer exam questions from the perverted killer? WATCHING IT. I am soooo down for that premise.

side note: The title is a really cute play on the Chinese characters that the Korean word for exams is based on, as the Korean word “sa” (査) meaning examine, shares the same pronunciation with “sa”(死), which means death.

The movie starts out with a freaky dream sequence in which a female student suffers from deranged looking classmates smiling at her in a creepy fashion. When the girl wakes up, it’s like “hello crotch shot” and her dorm-mates are like “sucks you got your period on the last day of exams” and I was like, “was that really necessary?” I’m assuming that this was just foreshadowing to let the viewer know that the movie intended to disregard its own rules.

At first I thought the subtitles sucked. So then I strained my ears and my brain to make sure that they were matching up with the Korean as per my understanding. You see, the kids were all gathered for their special saturday study session when suddenly up pops this video of the number 1 girl in the school being drowned in a tank of water. The set up promised that the kids would be killed one by one according to class rank if the exam questions weren’t answered.

So, why is it that they were murdered even if the questions were answered satisfactorily?  Either both myself and the subtitle writer were completely misunderstanding things, or the screenplay just didn’t care. Logic? What’s that? Clearly not necessary to a good script. Everyone knows that horror movies are just an excuse for torture-porn.

Since Kim Bum was in the film, playing Kang Hyeon, I decided to stick out the movie. Lee Beom-soo also gave a decent performance. Next time I’ll just watch a drama.