The movie “Epitaph” has released last august in Korea and goes to release in another Asian country on October with subtitled “The Last Breath”. Now this K-horror is on the way to being one member of your home cinema collections with its release on DVD format which expected this November 29. The plot and storyline of “Epitaph” will goes a little different with other K-horror which you’ve ever seen before, co-directed by two breakthrough directors the Jung Brothers, which divided their movie into three different stories that have a connection on each other. With this movie, Jung Brothers or Jung Sik and Jung Bum-sik were honored with the New Director award at the Pusan Film Critic Awards and also received their first international recognition when “Epitaph” screened in the 2007 San Sebastian International Film Festival. This is a horror movie with finesse cinematography, intriguing plot, great acting and amazing set where it approximately is in the hospital (another Korean horror set in the hospital after "The Cut") on the year of 1940’s when Seoul was in the long occupation of Japanese.The story opens in 1979, when Dr. Park receives an old photo album from his 20’s in 1941, the scene which begin the mysterious journey through these three stories one by one, set in Ahn Seng Hospital in Kyung Sung, the capital of 1940’s Japan occupied Korea. A hospital that representing both side of the Japanese imperialism glories and the western modernization. A hospital that stood strongly in the center of the city, and the one that will become the witness of all the weird and horrifying events which will happens inside it. The first hospital tale will revolve around the life of Jung-Name, who was bound by his parents to marry a girl whom he never met which probably is the daughter of the hospital director. When he takes his first night duty at the morgue, he’s facing with breathtaking beauty of a teenager girl corpse who was committed suicide. Her beauty and sadly story behind the tragedy throw Jung-Name in a love feeling with her dead body, this all that will take Jung-Name to revealing his own dazzling destiny. The second tale is about a young girl named Asako, she was the only survivor in one deadly car accident that oddly enough doesn’t causing any physical damage on her but left her whole family died.
A psychiatrist named Soo-In tried to cure her suffering from seeing the dead every night after the tragic event. That when he learns about the young girl fatal jealousy against her own mother over the stepfather. The last hospital tale will take on the journey of two married couple doctors that will go across the two previous odd stories. Dong Won and In Young whose return to the hospital from their studies in Tokyo, but they were soon falling into a world of confusion and fear when they discover something evil is waiting beneath the hospital. One night, Dong Won following his wife who gets out of bed at midnight and witnesses her doing something very horribly which also will brings on their agony from the past.
Epitaph Limited Korean Version DVD will come with the following extra features:
* Audio Commentary by the Director and Main Actors
A psychiatrist named Soo-In tried to cure her suffering from seeing the dead every night after the tragic event. That when he learns about the young girl fatal jealousy against her own mother over the stepfather. The last hospital tale will take on the journey of two married couple doctors that will go across the two previous odd stories. Dong Won and In Young whose return to the hospital from their studies in Tokyo, but they were soon falling into a world of confusion and fear when they discover something evil is waiting beneath the hospital. One night, Dong Won following his wife who gets out of bed at midnight and witnesses her doing something very horribly which also will brings on their agony from the past.
Epitaph Limited Korean Version DVD will come with the following extra features:* Deleted Scenes
* Director's Interview
* Actors' Interview
* Art Director's Interview
* Production Process
* Making Of Screenplay
* FAKE Documentary
* Production Announcement
* Art Set
* Theatrical Trailer and TV Advertisement
Product Details:Product Title: Epitaph (DVD) (DTS) (Limited Edition) (Korea Version)
Actors: KIM Tae-woo, KIM Bo-kyung, JIN Goo, LEE Dong-kyu.
Directors: Jung Sik and Jung Bum-sik
Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic), Color, NTSC
Language: Korean
Subtitle: Korean, English
Audio Specs: Digital Surround 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0
Region: Region 3 South East Asia (including Hong Kong, S. Korea and Taiwan)
Number of discs: 2
Country Made: South Korea
Genre: Horror
Distributor: S.M. Pictures
Release Date: November 29, 2007 (Order your copy now!)
Another Movie Review (Warning! Spoiler ahead):
To brand Epitaph under the horror genre is not exactly right. It's more in line with the romance genre with a unhealthy focus on the undying type of love. Since Epitaph is segmented into 3 such stories and let’s review each of them individually. The first segment comprises of the start and the end of the whole movie. It begins with the hospital director, Jung-Name recounting events that occurred back in 1941 when he was just an intern at the morgue. He was betrothed to the director's daughter but was strangely attracted to a corpse of a beautiful teenager girl who committed suicide. In a movie that had similar theme to the weirdness of twilight zone, this segment packs the most bizarre revelation in this movie. However, the whole process took such a long time to unravel with very few scary moments that it seems that this whole movie is anti-scariness and pro long draggyness. While it might be fine for those who purchased the ticket for a drama genre type of movie, those who came to be spook might just nod off at the beautifully but overwhelming slow and tiresome shot scenes. After the first story come to a pause, the pace of the movie took a sharp turn. If the first tale was low on scares, the second one went overdrive to spook the viewers. In the second tale, we are treated to the little girl, Asako's horrific experience of staying in a hospital after a terrible accident that took away her parents' lives. While the haunting seems scary and bizarre, if one understand motivation among characters and family love in cinematic sense, it's not that difficult to get underneath the fright mechanization to see what's driving the scary nightmares in the hospital. It could easily be the scariest tale of trio but the biggest draw in this segment is the presentation of the strong parental love between mother and a daughter. What detracts this segment was the unnecessary additional twist of fate for the little girl’s psychiatrist, Soo-In. The essence of the second tale was already effectively translated from the screen to the audience and it wasn’t necessary to drag the audience through another round of gruesome mayhem. This form continues to the final story in Epitaph which denoted the misadventure of the married couple doctors, Dong-Won and In-Young. The young married couple had just return from their Avant-Garde brain operation from Japan and when they return back to Korea, a series of killings targeted the Japanese soldiers occupying in Korea. Compare to the second segment, the third segment overdose with twisted revelation on top of another. It felt that the storyteller was desperately trying to elevate this average tale to something more memorable but it backfires instead. This segment utilized one of the most interesting cinematography way of capturing shadow but it’s also has one of the most glaring use of computer generated effect which made some of the shadow effect look fake and cheap. The last problem it had was how it tried to link this three different horror tales together in a jigsaw puzzle manner. While some films was able to do it effectively like Crazy Stone where it successfully show how one person’s seemly innocent action would affect another persona greatly, Epitaph simply lack the fineness to do so. It will make the non passive viewers to try to figure out what's the point of linking these segments together and the result would be a disappointing zero. Personally, this film was actually good enough on it’s own without the disguise as a horror genre and trying too hard in its multiple endings or linkage. It’s a pity as it had potential in its set production, characters, story and cast.Review by Richard Lim Jr. From Moviexclusive
0 Comments: