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3.0 out of 5 stars Meh., August 8, 2011

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Death Bell (AKA: Gosa) Korean Movie (2008)(Official DVD) (DVD)

<strong>Gosa</strong> (Hong-seung Yoon, 2008)

Ever since <em>Saw</em> gained massive worldwide box office, the "put some people in a locked room and pit them against one another while an all-powerful, faceless watcher presides over the proceedings" movie has been done pretty much to death, no pun intended. Some of them are actually quite good (2010's <em>Exam</em> springs to mind), while "mediocre" would be a kind way to describe most (2008's godawful <em>Bane</em>, for example). <em>Gosa</em>, released in English as <em>Death Bell</em>, falls somewhere between the two extremes. It's not nearly as bad as most of these movies, but it's not actually, you know, good.

Plot: twenty of a school's top students are asked to come in for a week over the summer for extra classes, along with a handful of teachers, an administrator or two, and some maintenance folks. (It's never explicitly stated, but I assumed it was some sort of Korean version of cram school.) I'd give you names and link them to actors and actresses, but once again, IMDB is failing me. (Dear company who creates subtitles for Asian horror films, whoever you may be: yes, we DO want you to translate the credits. PLEASE!) In any case, everyone shows up on the first day, and while they're milling around waiting for class to begin, the school's CCTV feed comes on. One of the students has been kidnapped, and is currently imprisoned in a plexiglass box with a complicated mathematical equation painted on it. A disembodied voice tells them they have one minute to solve the problem, or the girl will die, at which point the box begins to fill with water. Everyone thinks it's a practical joke, until the girl dies...

The twist is not what you think it is, which is probably the best thing about this movie; once one of the students makes a conjecture about the possible identity of the person kidnapping and killing the kids, if you've seen a few Asian horror movies, you think you know exactly which way this movie is going to go. You're wrong, which is as pleasing as it is surprising. Unfortunately, the big twist tears a raft of holes in the plot in much the same way as did the twist in <em>Haute Tension</em>; the reason this movie is getting a higher rating than that one did is that Kim is a somewhat better director than Aja. Not bad at all for a first film, as far as the direction goes, but the script, which Yoon co-wrote with Eun-kyeong Kim (<em>The Haunted House Project</em>), leaves a lot to be desired. ** ½