It
would sort of be like collecting some of the orange carpeting from The Shining or the puzzle box from Hellraiser, except the grave of the kisaeng
done wrong in the 1967 Korean horror movie A
Public Cemetery of Wol-ha is very much real. At least one mysterious
collector believes so. He has tasked a private investigator and his part-time
assistant with retrieving the vengeful kisaeng’s grave stone. In the history of
bad horror movie ideas, this sounds like one of the worst, but the team still
does its best to fulfill its obligations in Oh In-chun’s Wol-ha: Very Bad Moon Rising (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Portland Film Festival.
Thanks
to the rise of found footage horror, videographers now have the world’s most
dangerous job. Just ask Aaron from the first Creep. Now it is Yang Jun-il’s turn. He has been hired by Kang
Chun-sik to document his mission. They must obtain the headstone of the very
late Lee Wol-hyang, as seen in A Public
Cemetery, by the end of the day, or contractual penalties will incur.
However, her true resting place is someplace in the remote mountains, where
cell service is sure to be iffy.
In
addition to Yang, Kang has brought his junior gofer Park Han-su and they are
stuck with the standoffish Masami, the weirdo client’s resentful assistant.
Apparently, the client also arranged a guide, Lee Jun-seop, who happens to
share a surname and the hometown of the grudge-wielding kisaeng.
There
is something very wrong about this Lee, starting with his aggressively annoying
sense of humor. Kang and Masami-san can at least find common ground in their
distaste for him. Even though he seems to know exactly where they are, he gets
them all thoroughly lost. With the daylight burning, bad things are heading our
troupe’s way. Of course, we’re talking about stalkery bedlam and madness of
some sort.
Very Bad Moon will definitely
inspire viewers to catch up with the 1967 film, which is definitely a good
sign. It also manages to breathe life into the found footage genre. Oh turns
loose several extreme characters are reaps the resulting chaos. You will want
to slap the nauseatingly arrogant Kang, roll your eyes at the petulant Masami,
and throttle the obnoxious Lee.
That
might not sound like fun, but strong reactions are usually the result of an
effective film. Such is the case with Moon,
which gets decidedly creepy when the sun goes down. Oh makes quite a nice
pivot, taking all the nervous energy from the awkward comedy of the first two
acts and funneling it into some really unsettling Blair Witch-style business.