Veteran detective So-young and her rookie partner Hyun-gi happen onto an incendiary homicide case. While Hyun-gi is goofing up and distracting So-young, So-young senses that there is something wrong in the case. They discover that the present case is somehow related to the mysterious death of a girl ten years previously. At this point, So-young becomes plagued with nightmares in which the girl appears. And the serial killings continue...
Remember when Asian horror was still a new concept, not saying that there weren't horrors made back in the day, but what I mean is when it became accessible to the western world. At that time, almost every Asian horror movie you saw had something to offer, something that was still new and interesting, not to mention original and scary. But unfortunately those days are long gone, and for every time when about to watch an Asian horror flick nowadays, that feeling you got back then is really nowhere to be found. Still, you're always hoping that this will be the film that will make that awesome feeling come back once more, but it hasn't happened yet and I'm afraid it never will. What once was something truly original is now something that just keeps repeating itself in one movie after the next, which in the end just leads to one disappointment after another.
Arang is really no exception when it comes to new Asian horror since even if it tries, it's just not good enough and you've most likely seen it all before, or most of it anyway. You'll have to excuse me for being so negative, but sitting through one new Asian horror after another, hoping that it'll do something for you somehow, but when it never really does, it tends to get boring after a while. Sometimes when watching horror movies, not just Asian horror but all kinds of horror, one has to wonder how much actual horror the people behind the movies really have seen. Sometimes it feels like they haven't really seen that much but still are determined to make a horror film, but doing so without having anything to stand on. On the other hand they might have seen much, maybe so much so that they feel that everything has already been done so they might as well copy stuff from different films. I'm not saying that it's an easy task coming up with a great original story and make a great film out of it, but sometimes (actually too often) it feels like a lot of film-makers don't even try to be original, and that's a shame.
 
Arang looks like most Korean flicks and that is really slick with beautiful photography and so on and so forth. For those who have seen a bunch of Korean films, this is nothing new and I guess we've more or less come to expect these movies to look awesome. So for what it's worth, it looks great but to be honest, I couldn't actually care less as I would actually have preferred that it didn't look so great but that it instead would scare the living crap outta me. As you can probably guess, it didn't. It had a few things going for it, one being good pacing and the second being two creepy scenes that while they didn't really succeed delivering the scares, they looked pretty creepy and were a big plus horror-wise. But with a running time of 97 minutes, two good-looking creepy scenes are just not enough.
The movie deals with a ghost, a ghost with a grudge, that is female, that has long black hair, that comes back to take revenge on people who did things to her in the past... Sounds familiar? The ghost girl was raped long ago (I guess the people behind Arang saw Shutter) and so she comes back to extract some revenge. This happened in a place called the Salt Village, where they make and store salt, and is kind of a deserted place far away from civilization. So this female police detective goes there, to that distant place, to find clues about the girl (I guess the people behind the film saw Ringu as well). For a while it felt like a police thriller because of these two homicide detectives who are trying to solve the case of some murders along with a girl that went missing ten years ago, while at the same time, people from that girl's past starts turning up dead. But it's no police thriller, it's a horror film that simply just didn't do it on the horror front.
Arang was yet another new unoriginal horror flick from South Korea that didn't deliver the proper scares. On the positive side it had really good pacing, along with that it looked pretty excellent and had two nice moments of creepiness and horror to offer. Unfortunately this was not nearly enough and in the end it's just not a very momorable film. Luckily it went by pretty quick and even though it had a few things going for it, it was still quite a mess to sit through. Personally, I'm getting really tired of watching these types of new films, still I always want to see the new stuff being released. And even if these flick bums me out at times, I'll keep looking because who knows, one day you might be surprised.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Ahn Sang-hoon
WRITING CREDITS: Ahn Sang-hoon, Jeong Seon-joo, Lee Jeong-seob
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Song Yoon-ah, Lee Dong-wook, Jeong Won-joong
COUNTRY: South Korea
RUNTIME: 97 min
RATING: 4/10
Arang Website/IMDB Click here
Arang Trailer Click here
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