Memento Mori: Creepy Girls Rule the Schoolyard

Whatever the Korean equivalent of the sibilant "s" is, the characters in Memento Mori are lisping it repeatedly throughout the second fright flick of the Whispering Corridors series. This homoerotic creep-show is like a lesbian hall of mirrors. Watch as the central tragic romance between femme psycho diarist Hyo-shin (Park Yeh-jin) and cold-hearted jock Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) is reflected in the obsessive eyes of Min-ah (Kim Gyu-ri), a fellow student who falls for Shi-eun then is possessed by the spirit of Hyo-shin. Try to ignore the Sapphic undercurrents in the friendship among Min-ah's sexually repressed gal pals. Pretend that the heterosexual fling between teacher Mr. Goh (Baek Jong-hak) and Hyo-shin is anything but perverted. Frankly, this movie is gay in the best way possible.

It's also stylishly executed. Spirit-world POVs show a world robbed of subtlety and detail; well-choreographed crowd scenes are shot from above a la Busby Berkley; even the artwork in the collage-filled diary — which Hyo-shin keeps and Min-ah devours — is lovely to look at. (The film snagged a cinematography award at Slamdance for a reason.)

Art house accomplishments aside, Memento Mori freaks because Kim Gyu-ri's such a fidgety, tormented, slack-jawed mess. You'll be torn between finding her acting horrendous and completely appropriate. How would you act if you'd found a magic journal with a secret transformation pill, an envelope of powdered poison, and a hidden mirror that led to your soul being snatched away by the memoirist. Of course, you'd be a total wreck. I suspect the movie's two writer-directors — Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong — were constantly giving their little leading lady conflicting instructions/feedback to keep her perpetually disoriented. Nicely done!

The other movies in the Whispering Corridor series are Blood Pledge, Voice, Wishing Stairs, and the titular film that gives the series its name.

A Blood Pledge: Sisters Are Screwing It Up for Themselves

There are many misfortunes that can drive a young girl to suicide. For Soy (Son Eun-seo), it's an unwanted pregnancy caused by a rich pretty-boy (Choi Min-seong) who insists she get an abortion. For Eun-yeong (Song Min-jeong), it's an abusive dad who repeatedly punches her in the face whenever she's less than perfect. For Yoo-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), it's falling grades, an unsympathetic nun, and a boyfriend who cheats. And for Eun-joo (Jang Kyeong-ah), it's a way to reconnect with a former friend who once gave her an MP-3 player. The last reason is hardly the strongest but it may go to explain why the ghost of Eun-joo is so pissed off at the other three girls when they fail to live up to the suicide pact that inspired her to jump off the parochial school roof in the first place.

Because her eternal bond with Soy hasn't been sealed in the hereafter, this bitter young lady is furiously seeking retribution from the two other means girls who stole her gal pal then her life in short order. That she's not equally angry at Soy is symptomatic of classic jealousy — like the wife who hates the woman who has stolen her husband, while disregarding the fact that it's the man who has betrayed her. When you're screwed by someone you love and you want to reunite with him, you need a target for all that rage. Lucky for Eun-joo, she has two. And so she terrorizes Eun-yeong and Yoo-jin by stalking them across the school grounds, up on the roof, in the bathrooms, inside the gymnasium, over their computers, and in their dreams. She's not a pretty sight either as her steady hand reaches out from the other side to choke, grab, and drip blood. Plus, her violence is hardly restricted to personal revenge. At one point, she causes the doting mother of the guy who impregnated her bosom buddy to spontaneously combust in a stalled car that then proceeds to drift backwards before crashing off-screen to cover up the crime. Now that's angry! A Blood Pledge is the fifth installment of the Whispering Corridors series, a horror franchise united by its all-girl high school settings and its Catholic school uniforms. More interestingly though is that the movie is helmed by writer-director Lee Jong-yong who co-wrote Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

Voice: Ghost Girls Gone Wild

Complain all you want about the misery of the paper cut. In Choe Ik-hwan's horror movie Voice, pretty young thing Young-eon (Kim Ok-vin) has her throat slit by a flying piece of sheet music. Now that stings! And before you have time to question whether that's even remotely possible, this fourth installment in the Whispering Corridors series will have you completely wrapped up in its strange tale of lesbian girl ghosts and Darwinian power struggles. And it's not just dead dolls doing battle either. You see, Young-eon's gal pal Seon-min (Seo Ji-hye) is being lured away from a posthumous romance by the high school's resident kooky girl Cho-ah (Cha Ye-ryeon) who, as luck would have it, shares Seon-min's recently acquired ability to hear voices from the grave. Cho-ah at least has the sense not to chat with spirits in front of her classmates -- a year in the madhouse provides useful life tools -- and now she has to impart that wisdom to her new BFF before some angry phantom shoves the two girls down an elevator shaft. So who do you trust? Your old best friend who never invited you over her house but has a promising future in opera or you new best friend who's clearly crazy? Which one would benefit your own career in radio?

Whispering Corridors: The First of Four Parts

Room 3-3 is spooked. Just ask skittish homeroom teacher Mrs. Park or her replacement, the lascivious Mr. Oh. Except you can't ask them. They're dead! So take your question to another staff member and recent grad, the personable Hur Eun-young (Lee Mi-yeon). She, like you, is trying to figure out the cause behind these recent "suicides" and has much time on her hands to do so because she's without any classes to teach. (I guess this highly competitive all-girls school has a strict policy that first-year teachers should observe, not instruct.) What she'll tell you is that the letters JJ were carved into that desk at the back of the room by none other than herself. But as to the red water-stain on the ceiling, she, like you, must wait until the end of Whispering Corridors for an answer as to how it got there and why it keeps getting bigger! Not that she'll care. She'll be too preoccupied with convincing the spirit of her late best friend that childhood betrayals should be forgiven, not avenged. Park Ki-hyeong's ghost story inspired three sequels: Whispering Corridors II, Wishing Stairs, and Voice. Such is the allure of the paranormal when dressed in short skirts and knee socks.

Wishing Stairs: This One's (Not) for the Fat Girls

Now that makeup artists are obsessed with making ingenues look like walking whales, the roles for obese actresses are fewer than ever before. But contrary to the art department's claims, these pretty young things never look like real fat people. They look like women in fat suits topped by faces plumped up and disfigured by putty. It was true for Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal. It was true for Eddie Murphy in Norbit. And it's true for Jo An in Wishing Stairs. This makeover movement has no color boundaries! In Yun Jae-yeon's freaky fable about a staircase that grants wishes, the faux fat girl (who wishes--can you guess it?--to lose weight) simply finds her true self post-transformation. Lee Soyoung's script may insist that she's now totally bonkers but she looked crazy beforehand, too. Who walks around in a padded dress and adds prosthetic blubber to her neck? To actress Jo An's credit, she keeps her fat mannerisms when she's skinny but nowadays with all the makeover shows, why not just hire a XL tween and then really have her lose the weight? Anyway, that's the subplot. The central (slim) story is about two (slim) ballet students who are in love and in competition. Kind of fun actually.