Customer Reviews

Cinderella

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Buried under two pages of Disney movies,
you'll find this ruined gem.
Let me start by saying that
I am obviously retarded for cover art.
It always tricks me into buying movies,
that I know absolutely nothing about.
Tartan Asia Extreme usually has some dynamite flicks too.
This one however...is not one of them.
I'm gonna keep this one short and sweet.
I'm not here to tell you what this movie is about.
You can read that above in the item description.
And it sounds really cool....right?........right?

I found that the scenes moved way too quickly.
As soon as I figured out what was going on.
The scene was over.
The story jumped around like an epileptic cricket.
As soon as I grasped it, BOING.
There was little to no gore, which the cover definitely suggests.
One scene with two Korean girls slashing each others faces with scalpels,
which sounds much cooler than it really looks,
especially when dealing with a squeamish camera.
There was about one creep out, but it was all the way at the end of the movie.
And if you're conscious long enough, you might see it.
There was a good story here too, that really suffered from the erratic storytelling.
Don't get me wrong it had alot of potential,
but it definitely needs plastic surgery.

MORAL OF THE STORY
Beauty may only be skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.

The daughter of a plastic surgeon is the envy of her peers, but when several of them die under mysterious circumstances, Hyunsu will discover the ghastly secrets behind her beauty. CINDERELLA is Korea's answer to the surgical horror themes first presented in Georges Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE, mixing several gory moments of bodily dismemberment with the Asian supernatural revenge thrillers. Although it is light on any truly terrifying moments, CINDERELLA builds itself on the character drama between Hyunsu and her protective mother, and succeeds in producing a suspenseful mystery out of their struggle. Unfortunately, the tangled story threads and awkward editing make it difficult to decipher what exactly is going on, and when. The supernatural elements of the plot also seem entirely out of place, especially when the film's reveal in the end directly contradicts the existence of any spirits. Even with a decent cast and strong filming, CINDERELLA is simply unable to overcome the inherent problems with the script, but Asian Horror fans will not be overly disappointed with this one.

-Carl Manes
I Like Horror Movies

This movie goes extremely slow and carries off in a lot of directions. The best advice is to pay attention to all the details.
The movie is about a Mother that will do anything for her child and as the movie goes on it shows.

There is a deep story but depending on what your watching it for you can get lost with the ghost and scare effects.

***spoiler part***
Cinderella really is quite and interesting tale. I didn't like the movie at first but when it got to the end it all came together. There is so much going on that it's easy to miss out on the underlying story. The Mother has raised her own daughter to where she has everything and she is spoiled and thinks of her mother as her servant. As a matter of fact she barely calls her "Mom". Unfortunately the girl this woman took under her care to provide a new face for her daughter cared about nothing but her mothers adoration. All she wanted was her mothers love and to be like a normal girl. In her selfishness the Mother kept the loving "daughter" locked away from the world while her own materialistic daughter only thought of her as an object and thought little of the things the girl in the basement wanted so much. It was just another knife in her chest knowing that the other daughter was wearing her face. The face that she thought allowed her to have all those things she missed out on.

I found the movie to be more sad than scary. It wasn't until it was too late that the Mother realized just how much she loved the girl she kept locked away. Despite all she did...in the end it looked as though she loved her more than her real daughter. Although the girl in the basement was loving and kind the Mother always deprived her of the simple things that her real daughter took for granted. Cinderella was a great movie but the ending was sloppy. It's clear that the writers couldn't settle on if the girl in the basement killed herself or if they wanted her to live so you end up with a mish-mosh ending. It would of been better if the girl in the basement lived than to have the strange ghost ending.

Cinderella starts off like most of the (and I hate to say this) Ghost girl with long hair movies... but midway if breaks off and becomes a truly different movie. I give it 4/5 for the drama story and 3/5 for the horror story.

Worth taking a look if your open minded.

Coulda been a lot scarier. Seriously, not that many movies have a ghost like this one.
If they had played up her gruesome appearance more, it might have produced some
good scares.

Shoulda been more dramatic. The matriarch's dark secret is truly heinous, and
would've given the movie a more powerful jolt of drama. Instead, it takes a backseat
to the (sic) ghost story.

Woulda been a better movie, had it decided what it
wanted to be: drama, horror or suspense.

I really enjoy this movie. Most asian horror films reveal why the story is happening towards the end. This film is more mysterious and you still have questions in the end.

Cinderella (Man-dae Bong, 2006)

Cinderella, Man-dae Bong's second feature, comes off as a cross between Waterland and Eyes Without a Face, with a dash of John Woo thrown in for good measure. Which you've gotta admit sounds really freakin' cool. And it would be, if this movie had the merest shred of, say, coherence. Since it doesn't, you have to pay extra attention to figure out what's going on; problem is, it's not a good enough movie to really command that level of attention.

Here's what I could piece together of the plot: Yong-hee (Punch Lady's Ji-won To) is a plastic surgeon and single mother, raising her daughter Hyun-su (Young Bride's Se-kyeong Shin). All of Hyun-su's friends want plastic surgery, and of course Yong-hee is more than happy for the business. Things start going wrong, however, when Suk-yung (So-min Jeong in, to date, her only screen appearance), whom we see getting a nose job in the opening scene, starts hallucinating soon after the operation. Others who have had surgery start acting strange as well, leading Hyun-su to investigate what's going on.

Drawing from sources as disparate as Time (the Ki-Duk Kim film), Waterland, Face/Off, and even the Ghost School films, Cinderella was either going to be a classy effort or a derivative mess, and we ended up with the latter. Once you've figured out all the loose threads of derivation, the movie falls apart. That said, here's something confusing for you: while the plot becomes entirely predictable, the movie is still entirely incoherent. Figure that one out. While I obviously can't say for certain, not having been around when Kwang-soo Son (Bloody Beach) was writing the script, it seems to me as if the pieces that were selected to go into this film were chosen with social commentary in mind (I keep reading in reviews of the film about the ubiquitous mania for plastic surgery in Korea, and I can see that reflected in a number of characters' attitudes here), but no one thought to revise any of them to make sure they all fit together, so the two threads of the plot never actually come together, making for an unsatisfying movie-watching experience. There are many better examples of Asian thrillers running around (such any any of the films of the aforementioned Ki-Duk Kim); check one of those out, instead. * ½