Geonchugmuhan yugmyeongagcheui bimil (1998) User Reviews

Another Korean Movie

[dokvader · 6/10 · 28 August 2006]

The Mystery of the Cube has an interesting plot but the execution in the movie didn't deliver.

Four people are drawn to a man's peculiar knowledge of a popular poet. Inside the poet's work lies a mystery and the group thoroughly excavates information about the past. When a member of their group dies afterward uploading a fictional tale of the poet on the internet, they now race to find out the truth before they will be hit next.

This movie is a typical and rather interesting mystery in sacks of historical facts and hearsay. The English subtitles confused me because it didn't clear some things when the plot was thickening.

Overall it was worth wasting your time for an hour and forty minutes.

Big ideas but no money to do them justice.

[Coolestmovies · 3/10 · 4 June 2012]

This ambitious 1998 mystical adventure-thriller pre-dates the Korean cinema renaissance by a year, and stands as a textbook example of why so few Korean genre movies pre-1999 were worth watching: the ideas of writer Jang Yong-min and director Yu Sang-wook--who MUST have been the biggest geeks in high school--far outweigh their budget. Their story of a group of attractive students on a mission to uncover secrets buried in the work of a mysterious poet and possibly restore Korea's screwed-up chi is undoubtedly the wet dream of many a card-carrying library clubber. The theories underlying the story are just so much paranormal bunkum from the Japanese colonial days, along the lines of water dousing or geomancy or zombies, but the filmmakers treat them with the utmost reverence. Unfortunately, frequent special effects sequences, while grand in scope, are decidedly less so in execution, which kills the picture's "reality" every time they're brought into play.