I suppose it is only natural that Asian horror should become as trite and bloated as its American counterparts. Eventually they will most assuredly start aping themselves – mining their old material for what once struck gold – and trying to recreate the old magic, only to fail miserably.
The Red Shoes isn’t as bad as all that, but it sure feels like a movie made upon audience testing, and computer printouts showing what has made the genre such a popular thing. It contains just about everything a good Asian horror movie should.
Inanimate object that take on creepy spiritual significance? Check
Young child becomes enamored and endangered by said object? Check
Single mom recently divorced, living in dilapidated and perhaps haunted apartment? Check
Gruesome, unexplained murders? Check
Gruesome, unexplained murder that went unrevenged? Check
Long, black haired girl in desperate need of a chiropractor? Check
Buckets of blood? Double check
Yet for all the textbook reasons why it should be an excellent creep-o-rama, it never really manages to pull itself off. At least part of the reason why Asian horror has become so successful both financially and artistically is that it managed to take a haggard genre and revitalize it with freshness. The Red Shoes does nothing new, but rather takes what has worked in the past and redoes it.
For all that, it’s not half bad. The production values are quite excellent and it does steal from some of the best horror movies this decade so I guess it would have to be pretty good. It’s the type of thing where, had I not seen all of the films it rips off I’d probably have loved it.
Let’s slip into the plot for a moment. Sun-jae (Hye-su Kim) catches her boorish husband boinking some girl and decides to take herself and daughter Tae-su (Yeon-ah Park) away from the adulterer and they move into a run down old apartment (did somebody say Dark Water?)
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