CCTV: Someone's Always Watching

Now that we carry our phones wherever we go and sit at desks topped by computers with built-in cameras, our activities and whereabouts are pretty much monitored from dawn to dusk. Is paranoia inevitable? Or has this technologically invasive element turned us into performers 24/7? Either way, the news crew in CCTV is having a particularly rough go of it this particular day because their on-the-job recordings are being invaded by a murderous spirit, recalling the station's sordid past. Which seems to have little influence in inhibiting them from committing various distasteful acts within the workplace, supernatural be damned.

Indebted to The Ring (possessed videos), The Blair Wood Project (found footage), Poltergeist (soul-swallowing televisions), The Exorcist (demon possession), The Sentinel (whited-out eyes), and Terror Train (New Year's Eve setting), writer-director Kim Hong-ik's low-budget horror flick can come across like a skeleton assembled from random bones. The action — appropriately perhaps — takes place in some in between time where staffers work on cell phones and paper notepads with nary a laptop or USB drive in sight. And despite the murders piling up in the newsroom, everyone's hesitant to call the police. No one trusts authority. Not in this building! How can they when there are so many backstabbers around that you're hardly surprised when one character (Kwak Do-won) gets stabbed in the eye. The takeaway: Trust no one. Even if they've got the evidence on a VHS tape. (Which is another way of saying, I didn't buy this movie's late-in-the-game whodunit explanation.)