The visually stunning beginning of the movie tells the story of a doll maker who makes a doll and uses his real life love as a model for it. The doll maker being unaware of that the actual doll he made somehow became living even though it looked exactly like a doll and shortly there after his girl was found hung in a tree and the doll maker was accused for her murder and therefore killed. Much later on in present time four people are invited to a house to be models for dolls but a fifth one also comes along without being invited. The house itself is full of dolls made out of human models. After just being in the house a short while, strange things start to happen to each one of the newly arrived guests and there are also other strange things going on there, like a man being chained in the basement and some weird acting girl in a red dress showing up every now and then.
This movie looks fantastic when it starts, it has this stunning intro and the way the story is told in the introduction itself makes it look like a dark fairytale which I found very appealing. It also has this music to go with the intro which fits it just perfectly and you so wish the movie's gonna look, sound and be like this till the very end, unfortunately it's just like this in the very beginning.
The rest is of course watchable and looks very good too, but the actual intro got my hopes up so much it was kinda hard to get into it as much once the intro finished.
 
The characters in this movie are all not very likable except for maybe one girl who seems to be the most normal one, but the acting of all is very good, not being an unusual thing when it comes to Korean movies.
The Doll Master is a decent horror flick with a few good scares and a lot of scares that might not be so good, there are actually a whole lot of scares in it and once it gets started it keeps going like that almost throughout the movie and even though it might not be that scary, at least stuff happen all the time and keeps it from being slow paced.
Towards the ending it gets a bit dull though and I wish they would've considered doing something else there, but then at the actual ending there's a really cool short scene where a lot of dolls comes alive and it was very nicely done.
All in all I think The Doll Master is an ok horror movie that's worth checking out, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that it's really good because it's not.
Back to Asian Review Archive
|
ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Inhyeongsa
MOVIE YEAR: 2004
DIRECTOR: Yong-ki Jeong
WRITING CREDITS: Yong-ki Jeong
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Yu-mi Kim, Eun-kyeong Lim, Ji-young Ok
COUNTRY: South Korea
RUNTIME: 99 min
RATING: 6/10
Doll Master, The Website/IMDB Click here
Doll Master, The Trailer Click here
|
