Phone focuses on young journalist Ji-won (Ji-won Ha) who begins to receive threatening calls on her cell phone after publishing a piece on pedophilia. To put a stop to the rush of her journalist life, Ji-won gets a new cell phone number and leaves town to get away. Soon after, a friend's daughter uses Ji-won's phone and begins to scream in terror and abruptly turns into a little daddy-obsessed weirdo. This triggers a series of strange & disturbing events that surround Ji-won and lead her to uncover a mystery of the past.
If I'm going to start out with a good Asian horror, this feels like it would be a pretty good start. It hasn't been remade (yet), it's reasonably well known, and it's received a solid response from viewers. I can't say the story was completely original as the "cursed electronics" theme seems common in Asian horror these days, but it's just about how the writer uses the idea. This concept was done well enough for me. Byeong-ki Ahn's direction took the creepy script and translated it well to the screen and made it into a wickedly spooky little horror. The house Ji-won moves to really helped out with the spookiness using the mix of the unfinished interior and modern style for a creepy little setting. For me, acting quality is a bit more difficult to gauge when it comes to a language and culture I'm not familiar with, but the cast here seemed to deliver strong performances and played well with the rest of the film (especially Seo-woo Eun who played the little maniac disturbingly well). On the negative side, it does have a few problems when it comes to the cheap & cliché scares it goes for, along with some of the far overdone effects that we see in too many movies these days. Granted, it has been a few years since its release which has given plenty of time for other movies to do what Phone did here, but some of these effects were overused even before its 2002 release. Another issue I had shows as the film does go on. The story does get a little muddled once it starts to tell the backstory of Jin-hee (something that is not helped by the choppy dream & flashback sequences). Once the backstory has been established and the film heads toward completion, however, we're given a very creepy, very weird, and very interesting conclusion that makes for a well rounded film. Overall, while this variation on the tech-horror subgenre may not be the best, it does serve an interesting story with some well designed characters in a quite disturbing & reasonably well structured story.
Final Verdict: 7.5/10
-AP3-
If I'm going to start out with a good Asian horror, this feels like it would be a pretty good start. It hasn't been remade (yet), it's reasonably well known, and it's received a solid response from viewers. I can't say the story was completely original as the "cursed electronics" theme seems common in Asian horror these days, but it's just about how the writer uses the idea. This concept was done well enough for me. Byeong-ki Ahn's direction took the creepy script and translated it well to the screen and made it into a wickedly spooky little horror. The house Ji-won moves to really helped out with the spookiness using the mix of the unfinished interior and modern style for a creepy little setting. For me, acting quality is a bit more difficult to gauge when it comes to a language and culture I'm not familiar with, but the cast here seemed to deliver strong performances and played well with the rest of the film (especially Seo-woo Eun who played the little maniac disturbingly well). On the negative side, it does have a few problems when it comes to the cheap & cliché scares it goes for, along with some of the far overdone effects that we see in too many movies these days. Granted, it has been a few years since its release which has given plenty of time for other movies to do what Phone did here, but some of these effects were overused even before its 2002 release. Another issue I had shows as the film does go on. The story does get a little muddled once it starts to tell the backstory of Jin-hee (something that is not helped by the choppy dream & flashback sequences). Once the backstory has been established and the film heads toward completion, however, we're given a very creepy, very weird, and very interesting conclusion that makes for a well rounded film. Overall, while this variation on the tech-horror subgenre may not be the best, it does serve an interesting story with some well designed characters in a quite disturbing & reasonably well structured story.
Final Verdict: 7.5/10
-AP3-