A Blood Pledge

Yeogo goedam 5: Dong-ban-ja-sal (2009), South Korea

Synopsis
A Blood Pledge is the fifth film in the film series telling the story of four girls, Eon-joo (Jan Gyung-ah), So-yi (Son Eun-seo), Eun-young (Song Min-jeong) and Yu-jin (Oh Yeon-seo), which apparently make a collective pact to commit suicide. Although all of them seem to climb to the roof of the building, only one of the students jumps to her death. Among speculation of what actually happened, rumors of the reasons for Eon-jon's suicide and the appearance of Jeong-eon (Yoo Shin-ae) the younger sister of the victim, the story quickly seems to take its shape through the contours of the truth.

Review
Series of American films, with special emphasis on those concerning the horror genre, are usually known by their apparent tendency to repetition and rapidly exhausting the originality sometimes achieved in the first film. The series Whispering Corridors is however the opposite of this american tendency, being apparently able in five films and ten years after to keep a simple premise and combining differently terror adjacent to ghost stories.

Contrary to some of the previous films in the series, A Blood Pledge clearly proposes itself explicitly as an horror movie, investing in concrete elements supposed to scare the viewer, and limiting in an obvious way the investment in the history plot. The film follows the possibly least interesting and most generic of the arguments registered in the series, although being the first that considers the topic of group suicide among students in Korea. The characters are particularly uninteresting (especially the main protagonist and the ghost), with ineffective and exaggerated acting being often registered. The explanation of the events is done in a slow pace, with no particular final twist (as commonly observed in the current panorama of classic Asian cinema). A Blood Pledge stands out as the first film repeating obvious elements previously used in the series, recurring to a few acceptably well done scares under the clear influence of Ringu. A wide range (not guaranteeing its effectiveness) of special effects is also used, usually with an unreasonable exaggeration of blood and a few laughable moments of attempt of terror (special emphasis on an exploding head...). All in all, A Blood Pledge still provides a good entertainment, but is merely a simplistic horror movie devoid of anything even considered remotely interesting.