Bloody Beach		Return to Pan-Asia Review Archive
	Year:	2000	The kids of Bloody Beach
	Director:	Kim In-soo
	Cast:	Kim Hyun-jung, Lee Hyun-kyun, Lee Seung-Chae, Yang Dong-kun, Lee Se-Eun, Lee Jung-Jin, Jin Tae-Sung, Lee Chul-Jin, Kim Min-Sun (cameo), Lee Eun-Joo (cameo)
	The Skinny:	Wow! It's a movie about pretty people who kill each other. I've never seen that before...
	Review by LunaSea:	Horror is not a staple of Korean Cinema. Not only are remarkable horror films few and far between (Ring Virus, Memento Mori, and Sorum are a few recent examples), but there are only a handful of horror films released every year. Even more, those that succeed are mostly genre-bending affairs which often don't have much to do with conventional horror formulas. Bloody Beach is a pure teen slasher flick in the vein of the Scream trilogy and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Or, taking only Korean Cinema into consideration, the film is much like Ahn Byung-ki's The Scissors (AKA: Nightmare/The Horror Game Movie), Harpy or the pitiful Record.      One thing Wes Craven and Co. did with their "horror revolution" was completely hack to pieces (pun intended) a genre that was producing fine works. Now seemingly every film of the genre has to be tongue-in-cheek, and never take itself seriously. The negative influence repeats itself with director Kim In-soo's first work. There's nothing particularly horrible here, except a few forced expressions (mostly by the guys), silly gore and the usual predictable "horror soundtrack." The problem is the story and characters, which are totally pedestrian in both premise and portrayal. We've seen this type of film a thousand times before, with the same tired endings and whodunit shenanigans.      A group of Internet chatters decides to spend the summer together at a beach, renting an apartment and trying to know each other for real (or maybe they just want to have sex). Apparently a guy named "Sandmanz" committed suicide when he was ousted from the chatroom, and the group has split opinions on the matter. Some think he was just a psycho with no life, and he had it coming. Some others, like Yoo-na (the one who got closer to him), think that someone spread lies to force him to quit. Suddenly, the group is decimated by a mysterious figure who keeps e-mailing everyone that his/her fate will not be unlike Sandmanz's. The search for the killer begins, while people die right and left. Who's the killer? Is it Sandmanz, back from the dead? Or someone else? Do you care?      All the young leads are somewhat familiar (be it coming from TV series, or small feature films) and handle their roles decently, if not in an overly special way. The script wouldn't have let them shine anyway. The sad thing is that one of the finest young actresses in Korea, Memento Mori's Kim Min-sun, is relegated to a brief cameo. Her presence could have helped the film rise from mediocrity. Unless you like to watch teenagers have sex and then kill each other in cheesy ways, there's nothing particularly exciting in Bloody Beach. (LunaSea 2002)
	Availability:	DVD (Hong Kong) Region 3 NTSC Deltamac Fullscreen (Original Aspect Ratio) Korean Language Track Dolby Digital Removable English Subtitles
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