PopSyndicate.com

From the opening menu, with its soft, melodic music and semi-muted thunder crashes, Black House gives the feeling that you are in for something spooky, something to be watched in the dark, during a thunderstorm on a Friday the thirteenth. What you get is a valiant attempt at a psychological thriller, a bastard child of the Hannibal movies and Basic Instinct, minus all the naughtiness. There are so many recycled plot lines that it’s a bit hard to tell where cliché ends and the movie begins.

Jeon Jun-Oh is the well-meaning hero with a tragic past. An insurance agent new to the job, Jun-Oh gets caught up in the disturbing death of a young boy who, ostensibly, has committed suicide via hanging. Jun-Oh’s intentions are good, but as he investigates further he quickly figures out that he’s bitten off more than he can chew with this particular case. The boy’s father, Park Chung-Bae is a wellspring of creepy behaviors, which clinches Jun-Oh’s belief that the boy was murdered. As his sleuthing continues, plot devices pile up faster than the body count.

One could almost make a drinking game out of this movie, or, perhaps, play plot-device bingo. There are red herrings aplenty, cops who are so blind to the creepy goings-on that they approach the realm of ignorance, and a villain who – you guessed it! – just won’t die. Not to mention the token psychiatrist who swoops in just long enough to explain the difference between psychos and psychopaths, then meet a grisly end. His death, however, is not nearly as traumatic to the main character as the beheading of his girlfriend’s dog.

Then there’s the confused morality of the film. It raises socially viable questions like: are psychopaths still human? Is being a psychopath a disease? And just what will a person do for money? If the person in question has a hidden torture chamber filled with decorative nooses and dangling fresh, bloody body parts, the answer is obvious: quite a lot. Of course, the true moral seems to be, ala Red Dragon, that bodily imperfections will inevitably turn you into a serial killer

Despite the sub-par subtitles and the twists you can see like an oncoming freight train (I should mention here that the movie features a train that is sneakier than Jaws, which quickly endeared itself to me as the worst, most ridiculous and logic-defying death in the movie), Black House really did try to be a scary movie. The gore factor is pretty good, although you have to wait a good hour to get to the best of the slice-and-dice. In one scene, Jun-Oh is trapped in a locker while the villain tries to stab him through the slits in the front, and the metal-on-metal noise alone created a good, tense feel. Bottom line: the movie is a little better than mediocre, but not fantastic.

3