Black House – Unrated (2007/Genius DVD)
Picture:
B- Sound: B- Extras: C+ Film: C
At first,
Shin Terra’s Black House (2007)
showed great promise and was shaping up as the best thriller I had seen from
Korea since 301/302 (reviewed
elsewhere on this site) and I was very impressed. The story of an insurance executive still
upset by the suicide of his sibling at a very young age is now handling similar
cases. After a bizarre phone call where
he discusses too much about himself and points to a loophole in the contract,
the line between suicide and homicide starts to decay.
Unfortunately,
the screenplay decays first as this goes from a smart, intelligent thriller, to
a showy, unfortunate implosion of a Horror film with a psychotic antagonist
just starts to go over the top and runs out of steam, energy and ideas. It could have become torture porn or just
stupid, but it avoids that. It simply
breaks down into people attacking each other, which is a shame, because it was
on a roll until then.
The anamorphically
enhanced 2.35 X 1 image had more plusses than minuses as there are some very
clear shots, depth shots and consistent color for the color you get, despite
other moments of softness. The Dolby
Digital 5.1 uses the channels well enough to be impressive and I wondered how
good this would sound in DTS. This
should be interesting on Blu-ray. Extras
include deleted scenes, a making of featurette and production design featurette.
- Nicholas Sheffo
