Red Eye
Director: Kim Dong-bin.
Year: 2005
Production Company: Taichang Entertainment
Running Time: 98 minutes
Red Eye falls squarely into a genre flick category
– nothing very fancy or original takes place but at least while watching
it is somewhat entertaining though certainly nothing that you will remember
long afterwards. It combines elements of horror with echoes of a disaster
flick. There aren’t any particular scares along the way and unlike many
of the recent Korean horror films it is very straight ahead in its narrative
and forgoes any artistic pretensions. In the end I am not sure it made
a lot of sense but it is fast moving and flies by in a brainless manner
quite quickly – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing these days.
Fifteen years previously the 11:50 p.m. train
from Seoul to Yeosu mysteriously crashed and 250 passengers were killed
with only a few survivors. The blame was put on the dead conductor and
his family faced great public shame, but now his daughter Mi-sun (Jang
Shin-yeong) is starting her first day on her new job – selling snacks on
the train – a train that was made from some of the parts of the destroyed
train and makes the same run. This is her birthday – which coincides with
the anniversary of the accident. All of these are of course bad signs for
anyone who has seen more than a few horror films. If you think you have
had bad first days on the job, they are nothing compared to this one.
The train has a number of passengers on it – all
the usual types that one might expect in a film of this sort – two teenage
girls running away from home, a creepy brother and sister who seem to have
more than a sibling affection for one another, a young boy on his own who
paints eerie pictures of the past, a young group of adults who are investigating
reports that the train is haunted, an academic, a couple who feel fortunate
that they just made the train (or did they?), a couple who have a fight
after which the boyfriend gets off at the next stop – and then frantically
tries to warn his girlfriend that he saw something terrifying from the
platform and many others. And let’s not forget the ghosts. There are lots
of those – some still apparently pissed off to have died and some who don’t
even realize they are dead and appear as just another passenger. Things
quickly start going wrong. Kind of like riding Amtrak.
Mi-sun begins seeing apparitions of people and
a desolate eerie phantom train and warns that they are all doomed but of
course everyone thinks she is crazy. People begin dying – one by a wig
that strangles her and one can only hope that it is the same hairpiece
from “The Wig” as I would hate to think that is the next worldwide epidemic
– angry wigs. One of the students investigating can sense ghosts and she
(Kwak Ji-min – from “Samaritan Girl) is more than a little frightened (that
she went from a Kim Ki-duk film to a supporting character in this one!).
It never adds up to much unfortunately as there just isn’t a lot of imagination
at work and you never quite understand why this is all happening. As the
bodies begin to pile up so do a lot of rather absurd coincidences that
put the whole story on very shaky rails and as the story and the train
speeds up it begins to spin out of control and becomes a bit of a train
wreck towards the end. As per usual with Korean films, the production values
are solid and the actresses are attractive and there are many worse ways
to kill 98 minutes.
Rating: 6.0
Trailer
Reviewed: 02/06
Previous films from Director:
The Ring Virus (1999)
Mom’s Got a Lover (1995)