The Film

Followers of Far Eastern horror cinema are well used to seeing ideas stolen and regurgitated, initially by Hollywood but increasingly by the very film industries that gave birth to the works being stolen from. We genre fans learn to tolerate quite a bit, but it has to be said that Chang-jae Lim's Unborn but Forgotten (Hayanbang) really pushes its luck. It's essentially a Korean reworking of FeardotCom, William Malone's tawdry beat-the-official-remake-to-the-post retooling of Hideo Nakata's seminal 1998 Ringu, which has already been remade in Korea in 1999 as Ring Virus. The passing of time has not helped matters, with the plundering from the Ringu pot becoming increasingly a sign that the ideas bank has run dry.

Lim makes no attempt to disguise the borrowings and little effort to adapt them. Consider the following. In Ringu, young female TV journalist Reiko Asakawa investigates a series of mysterious deaths involving young people who expired a few days after watching a supposedly haunted video tape. In Unborn But Forgotten, young female TV producer Su-jin Han investigates a series of mysterious deaths involving pregnant women who expired a few days after visiting a strange web site. In Ringu the ante is upped when Reiko herself sees the video tape and the phone immediately rings, signifying that her time too may soon be up. In Unborn But Forgotten the ante is upped when the pregnant Su-jin clicks on the mysterious web site and starts having visions, signifying that her time may soon be up. In Ringu, Reiko enlists the help of her ex-husband and the two find themselves in a race to uncover the secret of the tape before she falls victim to its curse. In Unborn But Forgotten, Su-jin enlists the help of detective Choi and the two find themselves in...well, you get the idea.

Despite this rather precise recycling, the development is plodding and lacks the turn of the screw provided in Ringu when the tape is also viewed by Reiko's young son, as well as Nakata's enviable storytelling and atmosphere building, and despite a couple of half-effective moments, the scares just aren't that, well, scary, and in the case of the closed-eye doll that opens its eyes, dismayingly predictable. The nearest it came to even giving me the smallest of creeps occurred when Su-jin ventured into an attic crawlspace with only a torch for illumination, the sort of restricted-vision venturing into the unknown that always winds me up a little.

I've seen three Asian horror movies in the past week (all released under Tartan's Asian Extreme banner) and all are guilty of various degrees of pilfering, but at least Inner Senses and Cello had ideas of their own and were smartly enough made to encourage a degree of forgiveness. Unborn But Forgotten doesn't so much borrow as rip off, and not just from Nakata's and Malone's films either - hints of The Others, It's Alive and even The Shining are not too hard to spot, while the style of the opening title sequence has been blatantly diluted from David Fincher's Se7en. Asian horror completists will want to add it to their viewing list nonetheless, but they are likely to find that this time they really have seen it all before.

Sound and Vision

The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer here is in some ways typical of how Far Eastern horror to often looks on UK DVD - not bad, but not great. Colour is just slightly off in places, sharpness loses out a tad to grain, there is some occasional edge and pattern shimmering and the contrast is sometimes on the heavy side, resulting in a lot of shadow detail, all of which look like NTSC to PAL conversion issues. Slightly more curious is the occasional feeling that the picture is slightly squashed up vertically - this struck me more than once, but on checking circles (when they did appear) they seemed fine.

Of the three available soundtracks - stereo 2.0, 5.1 surround and DTS surround, all original Korean - it's the surround tracks that work best, with the expected musical shouts of "Boo!" considerably louder here, and the atmospheric effects and music more inclusive. The surrounds are not used to the degree they are in some Asian horrors.

Extra Features

On the Set (59:23) is a lengthy assembly of behind-the-scenes footage, stuck together without any real eye for structure or ear for sound continuity. I find any such footage interesting, but the formless and rambling nature of this one does make you yearn for it to be handed to an editor who would probably have cut it down to about ten useful minutes and begged the director and actors to actually go on camera to talk about what they were doing. Most of the dialogue is subtitled in English.

The Original Korean Trailer (1:43) is in slightly grubby shape and cheekily uses the term "Something New" do describe a product that is anything but.

Summary

Not much to say here, another mediocre rip-off of one of the defining films in modern horror on a distinctly average DVD. You've been warned.