“Blair Witch, eh? Hold my soju!”

This was by far the most conventional of movies we’ve seen in the Korean—and by “conventional”, I mean in the western sense. It is, essentially The Blair Witch Project, except that (being Korean, and it being 2018), instead of a couple of hand-held cameras augmenting a film camera, they have ALL THE CAMERAS, including motion-activated ones and a drone-mounted one for overhead shots.

Also, the film crew is going for a million Youtube(ish) hits. As one does these days. This provides the sorta thin motivation for the film crew to behave badly. Sometimes really badly and really dumbly as well.

(This review is gonna be a little spoiler-y because without that, there’s nothing more to write.)

The plot is that the producers of the Youtube(ish) series devoted to the paranormal collects a bunch of dupes to investigate a haunted asylum that everyone dies if they go in. (First thing Blake notices on interior shot: “There’s a whole lotta graffiti on the walls if everyone who goes in dies! That’s dedication to the craft!”) Our dupes don’t really believe in this stuff and, as it turns out, neither do our YouTube(ish) producers.

I can’t even qualify this as a twist. Obviously our showrunners are cynical hacks looking to exploit the paranormal for profit. They virtually say as much. So it’s not a surprise when it’s revealed that they’re behind the shenanigans when things get spooky. (House on Haunted Hill, anyone?) It’s also completely unsurprising when they’re not behind all of the shenanigans, and end up not knowing what’s going on. (Again, HoHH did this 60 years ago. With Vincent Price and skello-vision or whatever Castle called his flying skeleton gimmick.)

I guess it’s a little surprising how far it all goes. At points where you think the showrunners would be convinced enough that Bad Things were afoot—like when people have died—the chief guy just marches right on in to the death trap for his million hits.

As a movie, it’s just competent. Some jump scares. A nice way to spend 90 minutes if you like the haunted house thing (and we do). It’s beautifully shot, even given the constraints, because, hey, Koreans. They gots standards, especially visually. Many really, really nice non-spooky camera shots preceding the arrival at the haunted asylum. GoPro and drone-type things. Very creative and pays off toward the end for some shots.

Some nice horror effects and jump scares. Some of the nicer effects don’t make any sense if you think about them for very long, so don’t do that.

The actors are about as generic as they would be in an American film. One of the girls is named “Charlotte” and has spent some time in America and I think is more of a floozy than a good homegrown Korean girl would be. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Heh.

We liked it, but apart from the visuals (which, in fairness, are very important to horror films) it didn’t really stand out like most Korean movies.