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. | Phone
(2002) |
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This hit Korean thriller has received a less than ecstatic international welcome as savvy critics have howled “rip-off” in unison referring to the films very obvious similarities with Hideo Nakata’s horror masterwork Ring. The criticism has been harsh and stinging though is not entirely without justification. Phone shamelessly borrows from several horror films in order to shape its own concoction and in doing so perhaps loses its own identity in the process.
Though the film is indeed rather brazen about lifting cues from films such as The Exorcist, The Omen, What Lies Beneath, Scream, Dark Water, Pulse and Ring it does however manage to grip and entertain the viewer with its own “cut and paste” version, making up with heaps of style what it so badly lacks in originality. The pace of the movie, despite several muddled scenes along the way, is never less than snappy and the acting too is solid with the child star taking most of the honours with her remarkable performance. The plot is serpentine and often confused but in general it involves a seemingly possessed mobile phone number that whoever it is allocated to – they end up mysteriously dead not too long after. A pretty reporter is plagued by a stalker on her phone and after a friend dies mysteriously she decides to try to unwrap the mystery and finds herself stumbling upon a ghastly secret far worse than she could ever have imagined. To make things worse, the phone calls start getting stranger and more threatening until there comes a point when the wailing voice at the end of the line becomes literally impossible to listen to. Once, the little niece picks up the phone and the maniacal ranting voice bellows at the child something that has a profound and disturbing effect on her causing her to gradually start changing in mood and personality – she transforms into a particularly violent version of The Bad Seed, throwing tantrums and furling up those eyebrows to bewilderingly disgruntled proportions. The child becomes possessed by the murderous spirit of a young woman who had been wronged and who now seeks to exact her revenge for her own destruction. It transpires that the child isn't just a random victim but has been carefully targeted by the vengeful spirit because the kids’ parents have a few dark secrets that haven’t yet come to light. In a last half hour full of plot twists and turns the revelation finally arrives as a shocker and just when you thought you were over the worst…there’s still more to go! It’s a film where style has taken precedence over substance but the bottom line is that despite its pilfering of various threads from classic horror films of the past, it still manages to grip the viewers’ attention and to give them an entertaining ride. Plausibility and originality are relegated to the background while shocks, thrills and visual style are focused upon with a fair degree of success and the film manages to grip and entertain its audience regardless of its “borrowed parts”. The film has numerous failings, none more so than the few totally pointless and unexplained scenes involving an assassin who suddenly shows up without reason. The eastern obsession with long black tresses is also stressed upon in several scenes and bloodshed is generally at a minimum. There are several effectively mounted shock scenes that should have viewers leaping out of their chairs on more than one occasion and the cinematography is slick and gives the film the look, polish and feel of a high budget production despite the lack of any ostensible special effects. The film is a blatant spin-off (rip-off?) of the enormously popular and hugely influential Ring series and occasionally it totters dangerously close to plagiarism, however if taken with a pinch of salt and considering that most horror films are inspired by other horror films anyway, the film manages to entertain – so credit ought to be given as due. Horror fans who aren’t too discriminating or intellectually straight jacketed ought to find much to enjoy in this admittedly blatantly derivative Korean shocker even if it is merely a re-hash of Ring and several other hit horror films camouflaged in a flashy new outfit! Phone might well be a rip off but at least it’s a stylish and entertaining one.
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