Bloody Beach

(2000)**1/2

Bloody Beach is Korea’s answer to the popular teen slasher genre. A good-looking group of internet chat room friends rents an apartment for the summer in order to get to know one another better. We learn early on that one of the chat room members, Sandmanz, was ousted from the chat room and later committed suicide as a result. The group has mixed feelings about this; some believing that he was an unstable loner who deserved his fate while others suspect that someone in the group spread lies about him, which engendered this negative opinion. Soon the group begins to receive threatening emails suggesting that they too are destined for the same fate as Sandmanz. One by one they are violently murdered and Bloody Beach becomes a paint-by-numbers slasher.

A pretty good slice-and-dice that borrows heavily from the Friday the 13th formula, Bloody Beach more than lives up to its title. While not original in any way, shape or form, the film is saved by a level of sex and violence that is much more graphic than American cinema would ever allow. This is no scarier than your average Jason installment, but the Korean setting makes it more intriguing than it actually is. I found it amusing that all of the pretty characters met in an internet chat room. A fellow student in graduate school once dragged me to an internet Halloween party and when the door opened a midget greeted us with her hand out saying, “Hi, I’m Pat”. She was the most normal of the bunch.