Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018), aka Gon-ji-am aka 곤지암, directed by Jung Bum-shik, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original Korean theatrical 5.1, Korean stereo, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8119752/

Video encoded in two-pass 8 500 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : I ran into this one because I wanted to check out what was going on with recent Asian horror, and this turned up on quite a few lists of "scariest Korean horror movies" and such. To be honest, I wasn't terribly impressed. It's a decent enough found footage film, with a few neat setpieces, but it doesn't have a shred of originality in it at all. If you're into found footage horror about haunted asylums, and you're still not sated by the plethora of other movies fitting that description, this'll tide you over, I guess, but I had expected more.

The story concerns a up and coming ghost-hunting group with a successful live streaming channel, who want to take on one of Korea's most legendary haunted locations, the Gonjiam asylum. They recruit a few volunteers online, and set out to sneak in and document their night, with the leader tracking everyone's movement and video feeds from a nearby tent in the woods, in hopes of getting to a million viewers and some sort of fortune in ad money. Needless to say, things don't go as expected. There's a lot of setup and backstory to the asylum that doesn't really go anywhere, there's a mysterious locked room that no one has tried to open and lived, and the usual spooky wheelchairs and dolls.

As with most new films, this barebones BluRay is fine quality as it goes, although the kind of shitty video it was shot on doesn't require much, hence the somewhat reduced bitrate. 5.1 track sounds fine, the subtitles were a bit wonky, but I've corrected them to be more idiomatic and understandable, and there are no extras of any kind.

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