THE DUKE ON PHONE
Being a fan of the Asian Horror, The Duke has pretty much accepted
the fact that he will probably end up being killed by a haunted
iPod or some such.
I’m guessing there was probably some local girl who was maybe a
psychic or similarly eccentric, and she was probably killed by
either or both of her parents, possibly whilst listening to Ricky
Martin or Anal Cunt or whatever you hip young folks listen to
nowadays. She probably gets sucked into the chord-changes just
before the middle 8, and is forever trapped within B flat and A,
passing on her horrible curse of vengeance when anyone listens to
said recording at a certain time of the year, or a certain day,
probably the anniversary of her death / murder / being thrown in a
well.
And then The Duke downloads the latest Pissing Razors or
something, and thinks, “Hey, that’d go great on my iPod, just next
to that selection of spooky ambient noises.” Next thing you know
there’s a soggy woman crawling out of the 4-inch screen. I think.
Kinda hard to tell in this light.
File-Sharing is killing musicians, you pirate motherfuckers.
Anyway, if any of you Asian Horror Filmmakers are reading, I’d be
happy to hear your bids for my tale, which I call something along
the lines of IPOD or possibly The iPod What Killed The Duke To
Death, On Account Of Curses And Such.
The reason for this pontificating and pondering and so on, is that
I have just watched a piece of the filmed horror from Asia what
goes by the name of Phone. It seems that, not content with
ensuring we never again go anywhere the fuck near spam emails or
unmarked videocassettes or womenfolk, those cats want to freak us
asunder at the very thought of the text messages, too.
What Phone is concerned with, is a woman is in a lift screaming a
lot. Then she gets a text message, something along the lines of “I
h8 u, u 6y b8ch” or something, a derogatory remark of some kind I’
m guessing. What this instigates is a spot of the old flickering-
lights and then the lift stops and then the woman screams a while
longer. I think the credits come on after this bit. Oh, and I
think she dies too.
Following this prologue what has to do with the elevator txt
massacre, we meet a young reporter by the name of Ji-Won, who is
receiving weird phone calls, the kind where folks say “oooh, you
look scared” and so on, and then she closes the curtains cause
whoever it is is probably right outside the window, looking in,
making notes so as he can be ever more specific in his
descriptions. Also, she gets weird images on her computer, kind of
snuff-type affairs, with women being stabbed and then they bleed
some.
Sounds good, and kinda intriguing, the whole weird snuff on her
computer, and the voyeur with the mobile.
Fuck knows what the snuff-pictures have to do with anything.
Director Beyong-ki Ahn gets fed up with that whole narrative
device fairly quickly, and instead focuses on the text messages
and weird phone calls. He probably just wanted to make sure he
could get as many evil electronics into it all as possible.
It turns out Ji-Won has recently written an article about sex
scandals, and her editor is concerned that these named-and-shamed
deviants are the cause of the sinister phone-calls.
He might even be right. It’s as credible an answer as anyone
involved seems to be bothered with concocting.
What follows is lots and lots of phones ringing, and then numbers
being changed, and then phones ringing again, and then numbers
being changed, and then, fuck, the phone’s ringing! I’ll bet it’s
someone going to say “oooh, you look scared” or maybe ask who the
killer was in Scream.
It was Shaggy, in case you’re ever in that position.
Beyong-ki seems to suffer from the kind of ADD that, I dunno,
folks who write on the web-net about films but really just use it
as an excuse to say motherfucker and fly off on weird and bizarre
tangents might also suffer from. He starts off with something in
mind, but then, shit, that bores the hell out of him, so he’ll
head somewhere else, never bothering to say “by the way, that
thing I just spent twenty minutes setting up, I don’t think I can
be bothered with that whole affair”.
By the way, I read a fucking hilarious thing in a publication the
other day. I think it was about Michael Moore Hates Canada or
something.
Anyway, to return to the subject of the film about a phone, and
how it can’t make up its mind what it wants to talk about.
We get sex-scandals, and then spooky paintings, and then a kid
answers the phone and hears some demented nonsense or other, and
next thing you know she’s looking menacingly up past her eyebrows
all the time, sometimes growling and so on.
Once, she even says shit.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ji-won gets the crazy notion
to go and hunt down folks what used to have the same number as
her. She has a list of them all, and goes around trying to hunt
them down, like when Sylvester Stallone went looking for all those
women called Sarah Conner in Terminator One.
Turns out, all the folks that had those numbers were all young
attractive females, and they all ended up disappearing or dying or
perhaps getting thrown down wells. Also, they seem to have all
been learning to play the same tune on the piano, a melancholic
ditty by the name of Moonlight Sonata, most famous for its role as
Thing What Gets You The Gold Emblem in Resident Evil. It might
have been a hit for Cannibal Corpse.
Phone ends up being much more watchable than you’d imagine, thanks
to some reasonably effective scares and beautiful cinematography
by Yong-shik Mon. There’s a genuinely unnerving atmosphere to it
all, but it’s impossible to feel especially tense, since ideas and
narrative-tics are constantly being thrown like wet slurry against
canvas, but very little of it sticks, and what does just smells
bad and makes you wish they had thrown something else instead.
The whole thing is distastefully derivative too. Visual echoes
from the vastly superior Ringu abound, be it the grey waves
crashing onto eerily unpopulated beaches, or the kid with the hair
all down her face, or the whole notion of the phone being the
harbinger of some vile, diabolical text message of doom. In
addition, Kairo, another Korean number, is plundered for its scary
web-net shenanigans. Stir Of Echoes, too, gets a thorough going
over, and there’s even a touch of The Exorcist in there.
The whole Technology Is Evil theme that runs through much current
Asian horror is certainly an interesting one, and invites plenty
of parallels with 1950’s American Sci-Fi, another genre with a
reactionary fear of scientific progression. After the eighth
millionth shot of a ringing phone, though, up to and including a
preposterous CGI version, it all starts to get incredibly
monotonous.
Phone works best when sticking to the business of blowing cold air
down the back of the viewer’s neck, and flounders like some
stickleback washed up on an eerily abandoned beach when getting
caught up in the progressively ridiculous gimmickry of the plot.
The Eye, another spook-tale by fellow Koreans The Pang Brothers,
was just as derivative and daft, but offered genuinely piercing
moments, scenes that reverberate around the skull long after
you've forgotten about how awful the second half was.
Phone has no such qualities. It’s highly effective in places, and
it’s gorgeous to look at, but I’m already starting to forget what
the point of the whole motherfucking thing ever was.
Something to do with an iPod or something.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
the fact that he will probably end up being killed by a haunted
iPod or some such.
I’m guessing there was probably some local girl who was maybe a
psychic or similarly eccentric, and she was probably killed by
either or both of her parents, possibly whilst listening to Ricky
Martin or Anal Cunt or whatever you hip young folks listen to
nowadays. She probably gets sucked into the chord-changes just
before the middle 8, and is forever trapped within B flat and A,
passing on her horrible curse of vengeance when anyone listens to
said recording at a certain time of the year, or a certain day,
probably the anniversary of her death / murder / being thrown in a
well.
And then The Duke downloads the latest Pissing Razors or
something, and thinks, “Hey, that’d go great on my iPod, just next
to that selection of spooky ambient noises.” Next thing you know
there’s a soggy woman crawling out of the 4-inch screen. I think.
Kinda hard to tell in this light.
File-Sharing is killing musicians, you pirate motherfuckers.
Anyway, if any of you Asian Horror Filmmakers are reading, I’d be
happy to hear your bids for my tale, which I call something along
the lines of IPOD or possibly The iPod What Killed The Duke To
Death, On Account Of Curses And Such.
The reason for this pontificating and pondering and so on, is that
I have just watched a piece of the filmed horror from Asia what
goes by the name of Phone. It seems that, not content with
ensuring we never again go anywhere the fuck near spam emails or
unmarked videocassettes or womenfolk, those cats want to freak us
asunder at the very thought of the text messages, too.
What Phone is concerned with, is a woman is in a lift screaming a
lot. Then she gets a text message, something along the lines of “I
h8 u, u 6y b8ch” or something, a derogatory remark of some kind I’
m guessing. What this instigates is a spot of the old flickering-
lights and then the lift stops and then the woman screams a while
longer. I think the credits come on after this bit. Oh, and I
think she dies too.
Following this prologue what has to do with the elevator txt
massacre, we meet a young reporter by the name of Ji-Won, who is
receiving weird phone calls, the kind where folks say “oooh, you
look scared” and so on, and then she closes the curtains cause
whoever it is is probably right outside the window, looking in,
making notes so as he can be ever more specific in his
descriptions. Also, she gets weird images on her computer, kind of
snuff-type affairs, with women being stabbed and then they bleed
some.
Sounds good, and kinda intriguing, the whole weird snuff on her
computer, and the voyeur with the mobile.
Fuck knows what the snuff-pictures have to do with anything.
Director Beyong-ki Ahn gets fed up with that whole narrative
device fairly quickly, and instead focuses on the text messages
and weird phone calls. He probably just wanted to make sure he
could get as many evil electronics into it all as possible.
It turns out Ji-Won has recently written an article about sex
scandals, and her editor is concerned that these named-and-shamed
deviants are the cause of the sinister phone-calls.
He might even be right. It’s as credible an answer as anyone
involved seems to be bothered with concocting.
What follows is lots and lots of phones ringing, and then numbers
being changed, and then phones ringing again, and then numbers
being changed, and then, fuck, the phone’s ringing! I’ll bet it’s
someone going to say “oooh, you look scared” or maybe ask who the
killer was in Scream.
It was Shaggy, in case you’re ever in that position.
Beyong-ki seems to suffer from the kind of ADD that, I dunno,
folks who write on the web-net about films but really just use it
as an excuse to say motherfucker and fly off on weird and bizarre
tangents might also suffer from. He starts off with something in
mind, but then, shit, that bores the hell out of him, so he’ll
head somewhere else, never bothering to say “by the way, that
thing I just spent twenty minutes setting up, I don’t think I can
be bothered with that whole affair”.
By the way, I read a fucking hilarious thing in a publication the
other day. I think it was about Michael Moore Hates Canada or
something.
Anyway, to return to the subject of the film about a phone, and
how it can’t make up its mind what it wants to talk about.
We get sex-scandals, and then spooky paintings, and then a kid
answers the phone and hears some demented nonsense or other, and
next thing you know she’s looking menacingly up past her eyebrows
all the time, sometimes growling and so on.
Once, she even says shit.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ji-won gets the crazy notion
to go and hunt down folks what used to have the same number as
her. She has a list of them all, and goes around trying to hunt
them down, like when Sylvester Stallone went looking for all those
women called Sarah Conner in Terminator One.
Turns out, all the folks that had those numbers were all young
attractive females, and they all ended up disappearing or dying or
perhaps getting thrown down wells. Also, they seem to have all
been learning to play the same tune on the piano, a melancholic
ditty by the name of Moonlight Sonata, most famous for its role as
Thing What Gets You The Gold Emblem in Resident Evil. It might
have been a hit for Cannibal Corpse.
Phone ends up being much more watchable than you’d imagine, thanks
to some reasonably effective scares and beautiful cinematography
by Yong-shik Mon. There’s a genuinely unnerving atmosphere to it
all, but it’s impossible to feel especially tense, since ideas and
narrative-tics are constantly being thrown like wet slurry against
canvas, but very little of it sticks, and what does just smells
bad and makes you wish they had thrown something else instead.
The whole thing is distastefully derivative too. Visual echoes
from the vastly superior Ringu abound, be it the grey waves
crashing onto eerily unpopulated beaches, or the kid with the hair
all down her face, or the whole notion of the phone being the
harbinger of some vile, diabolical text message of doom. In
addition, Kairo, another Korean number, is plundered for its scary
web-net shenanigans. Stir Of Echoes, too, gets a thorough going
over, and there’s even a touch of The Exorcist in there.
The whole Technology Is Evil theme that runs through much current
Asian horror is certainly an interesting one, and invites plenty
of parallels with 1950’s American Sci-Fi, another genre with a
reactionary fear of scientific progression. After the eighth
millionth shot of a ringing phone, though, up to and including a
preposterous CGI version, it all starts to get incredibly
monotonous.
Phone works best when sticking to the business of blowing cold air
down the back of the viewer’s neck, and flounders like some
stickleback washed up on an eerily abandoned beach when getting
caught up in the progressively ridiculous gimmickry of the plot.
The Eye, another spook-tale by fellow Koreans The Pang Brothers,
was just as derivative and daft, but offered genuinely piercing
moments, scenes that reverberate around the skull long after
you've forgotten about how awful the second half was.
Phone has no such qualities. It’s highly effective in places, and
it’s gorgeous to look at, but I’m already starting to forget what
the point of the whole motherfucking thing ever was.
Something to do with an iPod or something.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
