A class reunion has turned into a massacre, and it seems only the
wheelchairbound teacher Mrs Park (Ph Mi-hee) and Mi-ja (See Hyeong-hie),
one of her students who has taken care of her of late, have survived the
ordeal. And fortunately Mi-ja is in a condition to tell the police what
has happened:
For the first time in many years, a group of her former students have
come to visit Mrs Park, whose health is slowly failing and who doesn't
have long to live anymore.
At first, everything seems to turn out to be a lovely
afternoon/evening, but eventually things turn nasty when it turns out that
everybody has been physically or mentally crippled by Mrs Park at one
point or another:
Somehow, Dal-bong's (Park Hyo-jun) leg got damaged in phys.ed. class
thanks to her, former fat girl Soon-hee (Lee Ji-hyeon) became
beauty-obsessed after her teacher made a crack about her body, and now
even plastic surgeons refuse to operate on her, Eun-young (Yu Seol-ah) has
been ashamed ever since one day in class that her parents were poor, Se-ho
(Yeo Hyeon-soo) has turned into an alcoholic since school, and then
there's Jung-won (Jang Seong-won), who once shat himself in class, when
his teacher ridiculed him and his mom died later the same day, he left
school for good and became an emotional wreck. But as if all of that
wasn't enough, there is also the teacher's own malformed child who lived
in the basement ... and god knows what happened to this boy ...
All this of course sounds bad enough, but things really turn ugly when
a mad killer starts killing one student after the other in increasingly
gruesome ways, until only Mrs Park and Mi-ja are left alive ... and the
killer Jung-won, who somehow manages to make his getaway before the police
arrives ...
The story of Mi-ja has come to an end, and the police decide to track
down Jung-won ... but soon they make a rather unpleasent discovery: The
whole story Mi-ja told them was a lie, and furthermore there was no Mi-ja
at all in the first place, but she was actually Jung-won (who turns out to
be a girl), and all that she told has happened to the others during their
times in school has actually happened to herself. But while the cops are
still investigating, Mi-ja/Jung-won has already escaped from hospital and
has taken Mrs Park with her.
To do what, to kill her ?
Nope, to commit suicide before her very eyes to have her emotionally
scarred for the rest of her life ...
For the most part, the film seems to be little more than a conventional
slasher, granted it's competently handled, the direction and camerawork
are quite inventive, and contrary to the usual slasher fodder, the
characters are all fully fleshed out and give the film a certain dramatic
depth ... but still, the film also has a masked killer (wearing a cute
bunny mask), a malformed child and really gruesome (and quite explicit)
murders. In the last 10 minutes or so though, the film takes a few unusual
twists and turns (like revealing that everything that has happened so far
was a lie) that put the film far above of what you'd usually expect from a
film like this and turn it into one of the most original horror thrillers
of the year.
Recommended.
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