Bloody Reunion | DVD Review

All the marketing surrounding Korea’s Bloody Reunion focuses on it being a slasher pic with all the blood and gore that the sub-genre engenders. This really is a pity, because the film aspires to (and achieves) loftier heights. It’s more of a mish-mash of styles, something that can more aptly be described as a brutally graphic psychological horror film.

On the other hand, they had to market it as something other than an Asian horror film, because then people would be expecting some kind of long-haired creepy ghost to pop out of nowhere and frighten us at any moment, right? Fear not. No such supernatural apparition awaits in Bloody Reunion; it’s the story of a group of students staging a reunion at their ailing teacher’s cottage sixteen years after having last seen her. They’re quite an interesting bunch, and after the initial pleasantries are exchanged and the liquor starts to flow we learn that each of them harbors deep resentment about how their life has turned out and they focus that resentment on Mrs. Park, the teacher who didn’t really treat them very well as children. We also learn that Mrs. Park raised her severely deformed son in her basement and that the school kids would often tease him through the barred basement window. This setup takes quite a bit of time to establish in the film, but it’s essential to the story and serves to build tension and mystery. The killing begins after an emotional outburst by one of the students at dinner that finally gets everything out in the open, and we are left to wonder, between cringing at the unusual but creative methods of murder, who could be performing the grisly acts. Think of the slasher flicks you’ve seen, like Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not one of them is as deep a story as this, and they definitely don’t wait until over halfway through the movie before the first kill. Let’s call this the evolution of the slasher film, then.

First-time director Lim Dae-Woong, working from a script by Park Se-Yeol, has fashioned quite a stylish and nasty little picture. While not as tense, it is reminiscent of High Tension, Alexandre Aja’s French horror film of a few years back. The bloodletting is extremely graphic and the killings, although crammed tightly into the middle of the film instead of spread out over its entire length, are extremely creative. Staplers and box cutter blades will never look the same once you’ve seen Bloody Reunion. Packing the murders together in the middle like that is quite a nifty little trick that leaves the director the whole first half of the film to establish the characters and ratchet up the tension, and Dae-Woong does this expertly. While none of the characters are easy to get emotional about, you’re still genuinely sorry when they eventually get killed – they’re not anonymous or one-note characters like in your typical slasher films.
Dae-Woong uses shadow and lighting to great effect but he relies too often on little camera tricks where a simple held shot would have sufficed. For one full scene the camera repeatly zooms in and out, even when switching to a different angle. A bit much, to say the least.

Bloody Reunion is by no means a perfect horror film, but it is a very good one, especially in this day and age when what passes for horror is simply to take a movie that was made twenty or thirty years ago and remake it. Sure, it’s pretty obvious early on who the killer is and the filmmakers decided to tack on a twist at the end that tries to tie things up a bit too neatly, but what’s not to love about a film with an interesting backstory (one that manages to somehow comment on political and social issues of the South Korean education system), many gruesome killings, buckets of blood, and a killer who wears a bunny mask?

Apart from the usually brilliant visual and aural delights of one of their releases, Tartan Video has delivered a decent bunch of special features for the DVD release of Bloody Reunion, including a 30-minute making-of featurette that is long on behind-the-scenes stuff and short on interviews, some deleted scenes with optional commentary from Dae-Woong explaining why they were removed from the final cut of the film, and a very interesting 15-minute featurette on special effects and make-up. The two gems of the bunch, though, are the 10-minute interview with Dae-Woong where he discusses character performance and his camera stylings and a short featurette of a cast photo shoot where you get to see the relatively unknown cast having fun while hamming it up for the photographer.

Bloody Reunion will most definitely please horror fans who are out for blood, but there is a little something in it for everyone, especially if you’re able to stomach some disturbingly grisly murder sequences. I was pleasantly surprised at the depth and tension of a film whose DVD cover plays up the slasher angle. And, oh yeah, did I mention that the killer wears a bunny mask? That alone is enough for me to watch it again!

Movie rating – 3

Disc Rating – 3