A Maldição: Despertar dos Mortos

I could not really get to the end of this movie. Unfortunately, though premise is high concept and clever, the pacing threw me off. The first act has a lot of fast-paced exposition, later I found out that this movie is like a sequel to a TV series in South Korea called The Cursed, one show that has mixed reviews - but don't all media have? - so I figure the exposition is to level set a lot of the preconditions for the story.

The visuals feel like a Dorama crossing with an anime, too surreal rather than horror driven, which was what I expected. The undead feel like super mutants rather than zombies, and the idea that they commit murder and every one just finds it weird rather than insane is too unimmersive.

Hollywood is pumping out woke show after show and movies too for that matter, and a lot of people don't like the end product. I am here to tell you that Korean TV is excellent! This show gets a little weird on the whole shaman ritual thing, but beyond that it makes for compelling, entertaining television! Watch this show! 7/10.

I had never heard about "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" (aka "The Cursed") prior to sitting down to watch it. But with it being a South Korean horror movie, of course I needed no persuasion, as I am a big fan of both Asian cinema and horror cinema. So it really didn't matter that I had never heard about the movie, and thus didn't know what I was in for.

Writers Yeon Sang-Ho and Yong-Wan Kim put together a script that sort of fell short of entertaining me. I have to admit that since I didn't understand the whole thing with the infection or curse and the crumbling corpses, then the movie just made little sense. And that made sitting through nearly two hours of this quite an ordeal.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and the actors and actresses on the cast list definitely helped to make the movie all the more watchable.

Ultimately, then "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" was not my cup of tea, and thus I wasn't particularly entertained, and finding it difficult to sit and watch it, having to feign interest in the storyline. But hey, not everything is bound to have an appeal on every viewer, and director Yong-Wan Kim failed to capture my interest here.

Visually then the movie was actually adequate. It wasn't a movie that was heavily reliant on special effects. But the CGI effects that were utilized were fair.

Now, I am sure that there is an audience out there for a supernatural thriller like "Bangbeob: Jaechaui", because it definitely wasn't a horror movie.

My rating of "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

What a concept. Awesome cinematography. Unique plot.

In South Korea, when a man is murdered in his apartment with blisters, the coroner concludes that the killer died three months ago. The investigative journalist Im Jin Hee (Uhm Ji-won), who has just released a book and created an independent news channel named Urban Detective, is interviewed by the host of a show when a stranger calls and schedules an interview with her, saying that he is responsible for the recent mysterious death. Her husband, Detective Jeong Seong Jun (Jung Moon-sung), gathers several police officers to protect Im Jin Hee from the stranger. He discloses that Director Kim Min Seop (Jung Jae-sung), President Lee Sang In (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his brother, the CEO Byun Mi-Yeong, (Oh Yoon-ah) of a big pharmaceutical company, will die unless they ask for forgiveness of his victims. When he is confronted by the police, he mysteriously dies, and he is another reanimated corpse. Jeong Seong Jun provides protection to the executives while Im Jin Hee and her team investigate the killers. Soon she concludes that the ambitious Byun Mi-Young (Oh Yoon-Ah), who is the daughter of Byun Mi-Yeong, conducted medical experiments with one hundred homeless people that died, and now a witch doctor is using the zombies to revenge them. She needs to find him to save her husband that was contaminated in a zombie attack.

"Bangbeob: Jaechaui", a.k.a "The Cursed" (2021), is an original South Korean zombie movie by Kim Yong-wan. The complex and sometimes confused screenplay blends several genres, such as crime, action and horror, with a good storyline. The greatest difficulty for us, Westerns, is to learn the name of the characters and depend on the translation sometimes not accurate. The scenes during and after the credits are messy and hard to understand. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Maldição: Despertar dos Mortos" ("The Curse: The Awake of the Dead")