Another Long Haired Ghost - Arang

First time director Ahn Sang-hoon helms this uneven thriller, Arang, which, despite some interesting takes on a done-to-death horror theme, fails to hold an interest. Veteran cop So-young (Song Yoon-ah), and her rookie partner transfer from the Forensic division, Hyun-gi (Lee Dong-wook) investigate a murder where a man is literally burned to death. But the autopsy reveals the man died an unnatural death; the burns were generated from inside, not outside. There is a connection to a tape that was found, where a girl is gang raped by several schoolmates -- the man was one of the boys in the group. One by one, the men involved start to die, and it becomes a race against time to find the killer. However, there are complications. Hyun-gi keeps messing up the investigation by distracting So-young, who has a checkered past of her own. She was raped by a man with a scar on his wrist, and part of the reason why she became a cop is to find and kill him. She also has disciplinary problems -- suspension for abusing a man held in custody. The killer is never caught, because it is the spirit of the dead girl, seeking vengeance against those who abused her. She was thought to have committed suicide after the rape, but it turns out that she was killed by another man who stumbled upon the scene. The detectives, though, find one of the remaining men at his home, half insane, his wife dead on the living room floor. The spirit had tried to kill him before the police came. She succeeds in the interrogation room at police headquarters, as he chokes himself to death. So-young is still troubled by the events of the case, and while reviewing the tape again, she discovers that there was another person at the scene of the crime. It turns out to be her partner, Hyun-gi! He had been in love with the girl when they were students, but she had fallen in love with someone else. As a budding photographer, he had taken many shots of her, so this qualified him to be the camera man for the rape scene, though he didn't know they were going to do that to her -- his friends had mentioned something else. Stunned, he tapes the whole thing, until the stranger arrives on the scene and he slips away. She confronts her partner, who has managed to find the stranger, and takes him to an abandoned salt mine, where the girl was buried. At gunpoint, the stranger digs out the girl. So-young then holds her partner at gunpoint, at which point he kills himself, satisfied that he at least made an attempt to atone for his part in the crime.

This is a confusing and extremely bleak and dreary film. Song Yoon-ah and Lee Dong-wook infuse it with a lot of life with their portrayals, but it doesn't compensate for the cheap effects and lame shock scenes with the dead girl. In fact, the main problem with the film is that a lot of elements have been so over done that it suffers in comparison. From quality horror like the Ringu trilogy to Ju-On, to inept works like APT and the amazingly bad Locker/Locker 2 films, Arang's only contribution is to work the detective investigation angle, which works up to a point. The plot suffers by moving from one death scene to another, with no real attempt at suspense. The intro to the film, involving two school girls who stumble upon the spirit at the old building, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, and is handled very poorly. It would have been much better if the police procedural was the main focus, and the supernatural deaths only alluded to, until the very end. Recommended for K-horror die hards and masochists only.