BLOODY REUNION
© Lion’s Gate
Mania Grade: B-
Rated: Unrated
Cast: Mi-hee Oh, Yeong-hie Seo, Dong-kyu Lee
Writer: Se-yeol Park
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Distributor: Lion's Gate
Original Year of Release: 2006
Extras: Commentary, Interviews with cast, Special Effects Featurette, photo gallery.
Buy it now!
Rated: Unrated
Cast: Mi-hee Oh, Yeong-hie Seo, Dong-kyu Lee
Writer: Se-yeol Park
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Distributor: Lion's Gate
Original Year of Release: 2006
Extras: Commentary, Interviews with cast, Special Effects Featurette, photo gallery.
Buy it now!
BLOODY REUNION
By: Tim JansonReview Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Bloody Reunion is not your typical Asian horror film. There are no ghosts or spirits…no dark-haired girls crawling out of wells, no creepy little kids staring ominously…no, at it’s core Bloody Reunion is a good ol’, American influenced slasher film. The plot is standard 1980’s slasher fare as the former students of an elementary school gather at her home for a reunion with their ailing teacher. An opening prologue shows police discovering several mutilated bodies at the home with only two survivors: the teacher, Mrs. Park and one of the female former students, Nam Mi-Ja. Mi-Ja relates the whole tale to a police detective while in the hospital.
She had come to Mrs. Park’s home to take care of the sickly teacher and thought it would be nice to throw a reunion with some of her former students. The include Se-Ho and Eun-Young who are now married, the athletic Dal-bong, tough guy Myung-ho, the “shy guy” Jung-won, and pretty Sun Hee. The reunion is pleasant at first as old friends become reacquainted and they gather for a BBQ outside Mrs. Park’s seaside home. As the alcohol flows, pent-up resentments bubble to the surface. It seems Mrs. Park mistreated all of her students in some way, leading to them becoming losers in life. She made fun of Sun-hee for being overweight leading to an addiction to cosmetic surgery; she hurt Dal-bong’s led, preventing him from becoming an athlete; she ridiculed Eun-young for being poor, etc…
As the group splinters into factions, some blaming Mrs. Park while others support her, a killer is stalking about. There are some rather creative and gory kills in Bloody Reunion that certainly make the film live up to its name…One victim is bound with his mouth wide open as the killer pours broken pieces of utility blades down his throat and washes it down with a nice drink of water…that was fairly inventive. We’re led to believe the killer is Mrs. Park’s deformed son who was kept in the basement and would wear a bunny mask to cover his disfigured face. The killer wears the same mask.
A staple of Asian horror films is the twist ending and Bloody Reunion is no different. Unfortunately the twist ending here in the last 15 minutes undermines the rest of the film, and completely changes everything you just saw. I had to watch the last 15 minutes a couple of times to figure out what had just happened. It was a bit of confusing curveball that wasn’t needed. I guess the director, Dae-wung Lim, wanted a twist that set his film apart from his American counterparts but part of the fun of those films was that we knew who the killer was in the first reel and we watched for the mayhem. The trickery here only served to derail what had been a pretty good slasher film.
One other issue I have with Bloody Reunion is the camera work. There are a few times in the film where the camera zooms in and out constantly within a matter of seconds, leaving the viewer disoriented. It was like a bad effect from a 1950’s 3D movie. Very weird.
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