kluseba "Death Bell" is a South Korean high school horror movie released in 2008. It includes lots of slasher elements, a few minor mystery passages that can be seen as a nod to many popular Asian ghost movies but also several twisted enigmas that the surviving pupils and teachers have to resolve to save those who are kidnapped one by one by a vengeful mind. Imagine a mixture of the "Yeogo Goedam" series and "Saw".The problem I have with this movie is not that it doesn't introduce anything new to the genre. A solid high school slasher flick like "4th Period Mystery" can be quite entertaining without being innovative. This movie takes too much time to kick the story off. The first twenty minutes don't even introduce you adequately to the story. The real reasons behind what happens in this movie are shown later in a few rushed flashbacks. The opening minutes introduce you to many unimportant secondary characters.In fact, there are so many pupils running around that it's a little bit hard to realize who is who. After twenty lame minutes, pupils are suddenly kidnapped and murdered at such a high speed that you might soon feel confused about who is still alive, who has been kidnapped and who is about to be murdered.Then we have the enigmas. Each time a pupil is about to be tortured to death, a madman presents the surviving crowd an enigma they have to solve at time to save their kidnapped colleagues. Sometimes the survivors even solve the enigmas but that doesn't keep the killer from continuing his slaughter which is pretty lame as the challenges feel somewhat useless. No matter if you solve the enigmas or not, the killer continues to spread death and terror until the very end of the movie.The enigmas are also rather hard to follow. The first enigma has something to do with mathematics but the solution is never shown to the viewers. For the second enigma, the survivors have to create a sentence which is very hard to understand. I neither understand the sense behind the sentence nor the way the survivors manage to compose it in the end. The other enigmas are a little bit easier to understand but not very interesting as well. The movie should have spent some more time on explaining the enigmas and their more or less associated traps as it is the case in movies like "Mindhunters".The ending of the movie is rather intriguing and includes a minor twist. Some people felt disappointed by it, others thought it was great and to me it was just okay. At least, it ended this short movie on a rather high note.Fans of high school horror movies or slasher films can try this movie out. It's nothing groundbreaking but surely entertaining enough if you don't want to watch your "Scream" movies over and over again. It's decently entertaining but only an average horror movie, especially if we compare this to other unique and stunning South Korean horror movies like "A Tale Of Two Sisters", "Bedevilled" or "I Saw The Devil" for example. But for what it is, it's an acceptable fast food horror flicks with a few Korean pop stars acting in here.

vainblood This is supposed to be a horror movie but it's not really scary. It has some suspense however which can make it worth watching and it's more like a gory slasher similar to "Scream" than a ghost story. Having said that I'm not excluding any ghostly presence in the movie. It's simply up to you to find out. The actors are good, at least the main characters but the rest is just average.The big disappointment comes later in the movie when the director is trying to tie everything together. The script just fails to make a trustworthy impression and you are suddenly very aware that you are only watching a movie when the characters starts behaving in weird ways and doesn't act at all how you would expect them to in their current situation.Unexpected events are good in horror movies but not in this case, where it's only confusing but like I said in the beginning, the suspense is there so it's not really a bad movie.

cadillac20 For those of you who like Korean horror, and who doesn't these days, there is certainly no real shortage. And Korean horror seems to have perfected the balance between the supernatural and the psychological. And the two often go hand in hand. Death Bell is a slightly more genre take on this sort of horror. It also borrows heavily from western horror films, most notably the SAW series. I would imagine this "torture porn" is something Koreans don't get a lot of, while in the US, we're plenty used to it. So, it's hard to look at this film through the eyes of its intended audience. Even so, Death Bell is entertaining enough, but descends into territory that is both too familiar and too cliché, even by Asian horror standards.For the uninitiated, Death Bell tells the story of a group of top-notch students who have been chosen to study over their vacation in order to take a test and impress a sister school. The best students in the school are chosen, but it is to their unfortunate fate. Soon, a sadistic killer traps them in the school and starts kidnapping them one by one. Each kidnapped student is then threatened with a torturous death unless the rest of the students can solve the questions being given to them by the killer.Once the film starts going, it does very much resemble the formula of SAW. Person is taken and put in some kind of trap, other person has to solve some kind of problem to free trapped person, if not person is brutally killed. And Death Bell certainly does this end well enough. The traps aren't as creative as we have come to expect from SAW, but they are creative enough, ranging from a clothes dryer to a candle wax trap. They provide a good amount of tension and there is a pretty decent mix of Korean horror elements mixed in, most notably the presence of a supernatural force.The acting is very good, with Beom-su Lee of City of Violence fame doing a particularly good job. The directing is also quite good. First time director Yoon Hong-Seung does a good job at building tension and mystery, and it is an impressive debut that successfully melds traditional western slasher conventions with Korean horror elements. Production is of the highest quality here. However, despite these elements, it still remains a mostly passable effort.The thing that really brings this down is the script. It's cliché ridden, both for western horror and eastern. There's scary ghost girls, obvious twists, and the attempts at pulling at heart strings, even though you can't help but feel emotionally detached from these characters. It might simply be a cultural barrier, something we can't really understand in what is a truly horrible academia nightmare. Still, halfway through the film, you simply stop caring. It just isn't that interesting anymore. By the time you learn the truth, it's not surprising, nor that interesting. Part of that problem comes from an over-complication of the films story. Elements used are unnecessary. If the film had been kept to a simple, entertaining horror piece, it might have worked all the way through.I rated it the way I did because of this. Everything else was top notch, and there was even quite a bit of tension, mostly during the torture scenes. But once it starts getting complicated, then it fizzles. It could have been better, and Yoon shows great potential for a sophomore effort. I'll even say that this film was very impressive as a first. But on it's own, it's merely a one-night piece of entertainment.

Coventry Meanwhile it's been more than three months since I watched "Death Bell" at the Belgian Festival of Fantastic Films, but for some reason it must have escaped everyone's attention here at IMDb, because the film didn't receive its very own page until now. Since it's been quite long, and since I watched a whole lot of other crap in the meantime, I'm glad I took some notes and wrote down impressions after seeing the film, otherwise I'm afraid I wouldn't have remembered that much. By that I certainly don't mean that "Death Bell" is a bad film. Quite the contrary, it's a very amusing horror flick with exhilarating gore and a dazzling fast pace. Originality, however, isn't the film's biggest trump as it borrows plot ideas and stylistic elements from various other and more famous horror movies. "Death Bell" somewhat describes itself as "Saw" meets "Battle Royale", with a bunch of high school students and their teachers desperately trying to escape the imaginative death traps of a maniacal killer. Twenty of the most intelligent, but also sickly competitive and pompous students of a prominent Seoul high school attend a special exam held on a Saturday. Suddenly classical music plays through the speakers and the television monitor displays images of one missing student trapped in an aquarium slowly filling up with water. The exits are sealed, the contact with the outside world is cut off and the group finds themselves subjected to the lethal and perverted games of a deranged killer. But who is he and what are his motives? Co-writer and director Chang (who was a guest at the festival and appears to be incredibly young) has obviously watched and studied a whole lot of contemporary popular horror movies and knows exactly what it takes to please a large crowd of fans. The death traps are complex and implausible – like the ones in all the "Saw" movies – but they definitely guarantee extended moments of suspense and a lot of gruesome bloodshed. The make-up and sound effects are fantastic, so if you have the opportunity to see this film in a theater or with luxurious home cinema equipment, you definitely will be overwhelmed. The characters are typical Asian high school students; like they appear in numerous movies, but the film does it best to provide as many backgrounds and little personality details that are also relevant. Considering the subject matter, and exactly like "Saw", the script is often incoherent and extremely implausible (example: how could one individual plan such a hi- tech and accurate large-scaled massacre) but you easily are willing to overlook that thanks to the entertainment value. The identity of the killer and his reasons are quite predictable as well, but then again, this is a film that primarily relies on inventive shocks and outrageous gore.