Manglyeong-ui gog (1980)

... aka: 망령의 곡

... aka: Bloudy Smile (Bloody Smile)

... aka: Ghost's Song

... aka: Mangryongui Kok

... aka: Song of the Dead

... aka: Wail of the Ghost

Directed by:

Yun-kyo Park

According to the Korean Film Archive, this thoroughly unimpressive film actually helped kick start a horror film revival of sorts in South Korea. While there were genre releases in the 60s and 70s, horror, unlike in most other Asian countries, wasn't one of their more popular genres until the 80s, and the surprise box office success of this particular title helped to usher that all in. Shame that the movie itself is rather weak.

After the death of her parents, teenager Jeom-rye (Mi-ok Ji) has been staying with, and relying on the generosity of, some Buddhist monks. That is until she's hit with an offer too good to pass up from the wealthy Madam Kim (Shook Jeon). The Kim family will provide her a home, money and a comfortable life in exchange for her agreeing to an arranged marriage with their thirty-something son, Tae-hwa (Se-hyuk Jeong). Jeom-rye takes them up on their offer and is soon relocated to the home, but signs this is going to be an unpleasant arrangement are present right away. The Kim family are desperate for an heir; so desperate they'd already banished Tae-hwa's previous wife from their home because she kept having miscarriages. After Jeom-rye dolls herself up to be presentable for their honeymoon, she has to sit and patiently wait half the evening for her new husband to even show up. When he does, he's drunk, brutish and almost passes out before the two can even consummate their relationship.

While she makes it clear that having a grandson to carry on the family name is of utmost importance to her, Mrs. Kim also pampers her new daughter-in-law and positions herself as a trusted confidant; encouraging her to speak openly and honestly with her. However, that nice behavior doesn't last too long. When the now-pregnant Jeom-rye goes to the hospital for a check-up, her gynecologist (Seung-il Lee) discovers she has an "ovarian insufficiency" (tumor) that will lead to gastrointestinal and heart issues, and likely death, if it's not immediately removed. The problem? Removing it also means sacrificing the now-three-month-old fetus. Since the fetus stands a good chance of surviving even if Jeom-rye doesn't, Mrs. Kim demands the baby be born at the potential cost of her otherwise "useless being" of a daughter-in-law.

Though she's fully aware of what's going on, Jeom-rye has no one to turn to and figures her strong religious faith (uh) will be enough to save her (oh). Six months later, she finds herself tied down to a hospital bed pleading for her life, gods be damned. The corrupt surgeon (Min-gyu Kim) in charge of the delivery has already been instructed by the rich and powerful father-in-law, Man-ho (Gi-jong Kim), to favor the baby over the mother. To no one's surprise, Jeom-rye ends up being the sacrificial lamb in this scenario. Even less of a surprise, no one in the Kim family is too horribly broken up about it since a healthy baby boy was able to be removed via c-section prior to Jeom-rye's passing. To rub additional salt in the wound, the poor girl can't even have her burial wishes met. Instead of being interred at the temple, Tae-hwa has a few of his workers bury her in the mountains near a construction site.

Now that we've established that the entire Kim family (save the baby) need to die horrible deaths at the hands of our heroine's vengeful ghost, and one would hope for some atmosphere and visual style, a few scares and perhaps some cool special effects as that's going on, our expectations go unfulfilled here in the worst of ways. The direction and camerawork are mostly dull and do nothing to spruce up the tired plot. In addition to that, the pacing of this film is terrible and there are no special effects unless one counts poorly-executed jump cuts, a couple of fish eye lens and kaleidoscope shots and colored lighting on ghost faces, as effects.

As far as the kills are concerned, they're unimaginative and almost entirely bloodless. The ghost first takes out the three construction workers because they didn't give her the burial she wanted. One is "accidentally" killed when an explosion goes off. Another tries to run over the ghost and it causes his truck to explode. And the last is killed when he Tae-hwa confronts him and sends him falling over a cliff onto some rocks. The ghost is able to eventually drive Tae-hwa mad by calling out to him and plaguing him with nightmares, then heads to the hospital to possesses the surgeon, who tries to stab his nurse (Ju Hyeon) with a scalpel and chases her to the rooftop, where the two fall to their deaths.

Instead of immediately dispatching the Kim family, the ghost just, uh, lies dormant for two-and-a-half decades! 25 years after the initial killing spree, the now-grown son of Jeom-rye, Jeong-yeon (Cheol Kang), has just married a woman named Young-sook (Young-yee Jo), and the two are getting ready to start their own family. Things come to a head when the young couple go home for a family visit, and Jeom-rye's spirit possesses Young-sook, which is so poorly-done you don't even know she's inhabiting a host body until a monk (Am Park - IO ISLAND) finally shows up to do a proper exorcism. I have no clue why the ghost waited so long to try to kill the family nor why it took the monk 25 years to perform an exorcism, especially since he's the same monk who was housing Jeom-rye prior to her death.

In addition to not being particularly interesting in form or content, this makes the fatal mistake of trying to flip the script in the last 15 minutes; expecting us to now sympathize with this awful family! Apparently they're all now "enlightened" after becoming hardcore Buddhists and atoning for their past sins. Never mind the fact that, due to arrogance, impatience and a stupid family bloodline obsession, they actually murdered an innocent young woman, tried to hide her body, stole her baby and didn't spend a second in prison for any of it. Clearly that's all just water under bridge now that they're religious! From an American perspective, this is basically equivalent to how roughly 99% of incarcerated killers, rapists, child molesters, etc. will become born again Christians and think claiming such should automatically afford them leniency, while the sane among us just hope they stay locked up.

There are also flagrantly sexist (the only family member to pay with their life ends up being the only female family member involved) and classist (the working class folks who help the family are immediately slaughtered, yet the wealthy elites get a chance at redemption and are supposedly worthy of our sympathy) elements to the script that are difficult to stomach. I expected a lot better from this considering the director was a genre veteran who made at least 15 horror films between 1967 and 1985. Maybe I just watched one of the rotten ones.

To my knowledge, this was never given an official release outside of South Korea. Even though the original title translates to "Song of the Dead" and this is also sometimes listed online as "Song of the Ghost" or "Ghost's Song," the original English title (seen on the 1983 Korean VHS release) was "Bloody Smile". Well, actually it's "Bloudy Smile" but someone, perhaps the same dude who wrote the English subtitles for older Hong Kong and Taiwanese films, used a long-ago-obsolete spelling!

★1/2

Ye zhi ji (1980)

... aka: 鬼圖

... aka: 夜之祭

... aka: Devil Design

... aka: Ghost Map

... aka: Gui tu

... aka: Ritual of the Night

Directed by:

Pan Yung Min

1276 China in the setting for the lengthy (nearly 40 minutes long!) prologue. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, is in the middle of expanding his Yuan dynasty deep into China and ruthlessly massacring any detractor along the way. Though the Mongols have been generally successful, pockets of resisters from the Sung dynasty have sprung up all over. General Ku-Shah (Ying Bai) is tasked with finding these people and killing them before they can pose a threat to Yuan. Upon completion, he's been promised a special reward: Royal marriage to a princess. A battle between Mongol and Chinese armies finds the former easily winning after slaughtering the Chinese troops and decapitating their leader (Chun Ku). The Mongol forces then ride on until they locate an abandoned village and settle there for the night.

There, Ku-Shah and his deputy, Ha-Tou (Han Hsieh), have an interesting conversation about how their spiritual beliefs seem at odds with their constant killing. To Ku-Shah, war is an "inevitable necessity to achieve one's ends" and the creator has made all men to fill predestined roles. God's chess game has but one king and his loyal men. Everyone else is meant to be "dispensable" and thus were created solely to die, which makes it perfectly fine to go around slaughtering them. They're not dead people. They're "destroyed objects."

The arrogant warriors in the midst of celebrating their victory are about to face their comeuppance as the destroyed village they end up in happens to be haunted by the evil spirits of those they'd previously slain. A lumpy-faced, cackling female ghost shows up and men are slashed, impaled with bamboo poles and forced to commit harakiri. Another has his own hand possessed a la Evil Dead 2 (only seven years earlier), which then attacks him and forces him to sever it, yet continues to live on. The Mongol warriors killed return as clawed, hopping vampires in wonderfully atmospheric scenes filled with lots of wind, backlighting and fog. Eventually, all of the Mongolian troopers are either killed or flee, but the narrator informs us that some of them will live on as evil spirits themselves.

We jump ahead 300 years to the Ming dynasty. The country has been led into turmoil due to a corrupt king, a drifting away from Buddhism toward amorality and the rampant use of black magic. The site of the Mongol warrior murders is now the village of Yen-Poi-Yi, which has been haunted by the ghost of Mongol warrior Ku-Shah for the past three centuries. As a result, the village has dwindled down in population considerably and there are only a handful of people still living there. With the arrival of an exorcist comes renewed hope and people start moving back there by the droves. Elder Uncle Lee (Hsiang-Ting Ko) suspects these new arrivals are phonies, especially after they ban mute orphan Lien-Hua (Doris Lung Chun-Erh), whose parents have been killed by the demon, from their festivities due to her presumably being bad luck. Uncle Lee is correct.

While the white-haired exorcist puts on quite a show for the villagers with a lavish parade, chicken blood, fire, smoke, acrobatics and giant spell papers, he's easily blown up / killed by the ghost of Ku-Shah. Everyone flees the village once again, leaving even fewer people than before. Just when things don't seem like they could get any worse, Yen-Poi-Yi is stricken with the plague, killing many of the stragglers. However, traveling monk Ou Ming (Chun Shih) arrives just in time to help. Ou Ming has made it his life's mission to re-introduce Buddhism to the people of China and thus save their souls. He orders all corpses and contaminated materials burned, even if that does upset some of the locals, then concocts an effective vaccine that saves everyone else. After he helps them repair their damaged homes. the sound of playing children laughing is heard around the village; a sign of hope that a new era is about to begin.

Ou Ming has decided that his direct path to Buddha and his final task will be to take on the Ku-Shah demon, thus freeing the tortured, murderous spirit from limbo and setting Yen-Poi-Yi on a path to recovery. In preparation, he shaves his head and then meditates while Lien-Hua gives him a full body tattoo, which will act like a suit of armor during battle. However, he's fully aware going in that this battle is most likely to cost him his life regardless. Sigh. The things we must do for Buddha.

Imperfect, poorly paced and heavy-handed at times, this is still a pretty neat little film which fuses history, religion, war, horror and drama. One thing it is decidedly not is a martial arts or action film as it's categorized on many websites, so don't go in expecting such. Despite the low budget, it's fairly well-made, has its heart in the right place, is often extremely atmospheric (particularly the first half hour) and also boasts some surprisingly creepy distorted sound design and synth music, which may have been stolen from other sources. There are issues with the editing throughout. Some scenes appear to have been clipped short, which may be due to only a heavily-damaged print being available to view. We'll perhaps never know for sure. The chances a 40+ year old Taiwanese genre movie is going to be fully restored at this stage of the game is slim.

Long-forgotten and seldom viewed these days (as of this writing, it doesn't even have the 5 votes necessary to clock a score on IMDb and has just two ratings [including the one I just sent in] on Letterboxd), this was released theatrically in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand and distributed on VHS in a number of countries. There was a U.S. mail order release from World Video & Supply Inc. in 1990, but it didn't come with English subtitles and was falsely promoted as Hong Kong action when it's Taiwanese horror-drama. I also found a Korean video and this was probably also released on VHS in Hong Kong and / or Taiwan. I'm not exactly sure where the English subtitled print came from.

★★1/2