This Korean import had me thinking that it was going to be a ghost story from the look of the cover. What’s inside is a serial killer thriller that seems somewhat quaint in that they treat psychopaths as if they were some brand new cinema convention.
Insurance investigator Jun-oh (Jeong-min Hwang) is told not to give out any personal information via his companies help line. When he’s called and asked if the insurance company will pay out in the event of a suicide he decides to try and talk the caller out of it.
However, the police think otherwise but Jun discovers that there’s a Mrs. Chung, Yi-hwa (Seon Yu), and he fears that she’ll also be killed for the money and does everything he can to keep from paying out on the son’s policy.
Soon odd things are happening to Jun, such as thirty silent messages on his answering machine and the silent Chung showing up and scaring the lobby office staff with his creepiness, and he starts to think that he and his girlfriend, Mi-na (Seo-hyeong Kim), are in danger.
I thought the cover made it look like this was going to be a haunted house flick, but it turns out to be a Korean serial killer show. What I thought was somewhat amusing is that when our main character Jun goes to find out about the strange Chung from a psychology student his description of a psychopath is treated as some mysterious, new condition.
It must be some sort of cultural thing in Korea that such things are not talked about or known or so I gather from this treatment of the terminology. In America we’ve got psychopaths on every nook and cranny.
The film also suffers, in my opinion, for a bit of overacting in several parts and when Jun is trapped in the Black House basement or in the big final showdown I was amused more than frightened as he did the “shrieking bug eye” style of acting.
Maybe it was this overreach, but I thought that the decision for the psychopath to play it as an emotionless person actually somewhat chilling. Since we’re told that psychopaths are emotionless then it might be more the direction they were given to perform. Even though I thought some of the acting styles was a bit over the top I thought that the film had some effective moments.
Black House is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include the 21-minute making of “Truth about Psychopaths” which appears to have been made for Korean television. The 7-minute “Secret of Black House” is about the film’s production design and there are 20 minutes of deleted scenes.
Black House is an interesting foreign terror tale, but has some over the top acting that I couldn’t help but make fun of. There’s some terror to balance that out though. Black House may not be the ghost story it looks like, but serial killer foreign cinema fans might like it.
Black House (Unrated) is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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