Arang DVD: Review By IrishBlood

Nothing new here, though not a particularly bad film. Arang is yet another vengeful ghost story where the spirit seeks both revenge and some sort of resolution to her (always a her) mysterious death.

This time around, the ghosty is attacking the four men who, long ago in their wild youth, gang-raped her and left her and her unborn child for death. There is a smart-alecky detective trying to figure out how these guys keep dying and her inexperienced rookie seems to be be more on the ball than she is. This might be due to the dark secret she carries with her that keeps her from focusing as well as she could.

Aside from a nice twist at the end, there is nothing you have not seen before. The scares, the effects, the sound track, the story, all done to death. Like most Asian horror, it looks great. It's well scripted and performed and the effects are decent, if a little cheap, but the originality is so lacking that I just couldn't buy into it. Had I never seen any of the hundreds of Asian ghost stories that preceded it, I might have thought this was much better. But I have.

P.S., at the end of the film is a written piece called "The Legend of Arang" but it was not translated. So other than being a city in India, I have no idea what "Arang" means. And I wasn't interested enough to watch the DVD extras that might spell it out. I honestly don't care.