On Tuesday, April 6 @ 7pm the Korean Cultural Service will hold a free screening of the Korean horror flick, PHONE. It’ll be at the Tribeca Cinemas (54 Varick Street, on the corner of Canal, one block from the A,C, E and 1 train Canal Street stops).

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Tickets are free. We’re seating first-come, first-served and doors open at 6:30pm. With 130 seats to give away, there’s plenty of room.

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But why should you see PHONE? This is part of the Korean Cultural Service’s “Remakes” series, and the movie has been slated for a Hollywood remake with original director, Ahn Byung-Ki at the helm. PHONE was the highest-grossing Korean horror movie of 2002, and it’s a consumerist nightmare that unfolds in sterile, over-designed homes that turn into gothic graveyards, as if a layout in
Architecture Today suddenly got hijacked by Mario Bava, and he turned all those contemporary furnishings into mossy headstones.

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And the Academy Award for Over-Acting by

a Child goes to…

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It’s all about a career journalist getting stalker calls after busting a kiddie porn ring. She switches to a new cell phone number and instead of menacing calls from gangland pimps, she starts getting spooky calls from beyond the grave. Things get worse when she visits her best friend, Ho-Jun, and lets Ho-Jun’s daughter answer her cell phone. Before you can say “Linda Blair” this perfect little tyke is possessed by an evil spirit. This gang of other well-dressed yuppies quickly discover that their stylish clothes and chic haircuts are no match for the spirit of a moldering schoolgirl having the ultimate bad hair day. Not just another clone of Japan’s THE RING, this character-driven movie is a very Korean nightmare where all those pretty things you buy are just a cheap bandaid on a festering wound.

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“Killing you makes me giggle!”

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But the real reason to see this movie is the cute little possessed girl, Young-Ju, played by the most insane freak in Korea, Eun Seo-Woo, who deserves a special Academy Award for her performance. Whether she’s French kissing daddy, hissing like a cat, or trying to break her own neck, this tyke is out of control in a way even Maury Povich can’t handle. It’s like watching Joan Crawford give the performance of her life if she was four-years-old and Korean.

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In true gothic fashion, the family unit of PHONE turns out to be just another nest of neurotic possessiveness, hidden homicide, and lustmord. As the minutes tick off until “The End” rolls across the screen, all the stylish ephemera of modern Korean filmmaking does a time lapse dissolve into an Edgar Allan Poe haze with unlimited minutes and no roaming charges.

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