Usually I don't like to post negative reviews on here. If I can't find at least a few redeeming qualities in a film, there's not much reason for wasting my time in reviewing it, unless I have either something worthwhile to say about it or it really managed to annoy me.
Death Bell, the new horror sensation from South Korea managed the latter quite easily.
I'll try to keep this short to avoid the unpleasant picture of me foaming at the mouth from pure irritation.
A bunch of students and three teachers are kept prisoner in their school by a mysterious psycho who lets them solve idiotic riddles. If they don't manage that, one of them is tortured to death in a mild Saw-variation. The mysterious killer has an equally mysterious love for using the most stupid methods of killing imaginable. It's especially important for him to ignore the way physics in the real world work. It doesn't matter a lot anyway, because his acts do not even follow the rules the film posits, so why care about physics? And why should they, when the whole plot only works thanks to the fact every character is an idiot?
Like me, you will be awfully surprised by the revelation that the murders have something to do with the supposed suicide of a female student a few years ago, as well as by the "surprising" (if you are as stupid as the characters) twists the film provides. The director, a certain Chang, also manages to add a few moments of the good old longhaired girl ghost, which doesn't make the whole mess more derivative than it already is.
The mixture of stupidity and unoriginality I could take, what fills my mind with stabby stabby thoughts when I think of Death Bell is that each and every idiocy, each moment I have already seen better realized in superior films is presented with the kind of grand gesture that just cries out: "Look how clever I am!", proving the people responsible (the guys with the pitchforks are already waiting for them, by the way) to be just as insipid as their audience.
Avoid at any cost.
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