Tartan Films continues to release lesser-known Asian horror on DVD in North America under its "Asian Extreme" label and while this follow-up to Whispering Corridors does have a few decent moments of style and symbolism it doesn't even manage to match up with the original film - a film that wasn't any great shakes either.

Memento Mori marks the second entry in Korea's "Ghost School" series and it suffers from the exact same problems that the first film did as it's entirely too talky, moves fairly slow, and it doesn't really get to anything horror until the final third opting to play out the first hour like a teenage drama.

Thanks to its unconventional structure of blending flashbacks with the present (to the point of it being somewhat confusing at times, let's just say undivided attention is a must), Memento Mori can't quite pull off its thinly veiled lesbian love story. Set at a Korean girls school this follows the path of two girls who befriend each other and decide to make a scrapbook together. Eventually they end-up falling for one another, which leads to all sorts of ridicule. Things get even more twisted when one of the girls ends-up jumping to her death.

Kim Min-Aun stars as a fellow student who stumbles across the scrapbook and soon finds herself obsessed with the girls who wrote it. From there we're led through a series of muddled plot twists that include the fact that two of the girls have a telepathic bond, that the ghost of the dead girl is haunting the school, and that sometimes secrets are better left hidden. It all makes for quite a head-scratcher of a story as we only ever have a sketchy idea of what co-directors Tae-Yong Kim and Kyu-Dong Min (who also wrote) are going for.

Memento Mori on the whole is entirely too subtle and it never really seems to be taking any sort of risks with its story. It's not enough of a ghost story to satisfy horror fans, and it doesn't have enough coherency to be very entertaining either. However, it's not all for naught as the musical score and its blend of orchestra and choir is quite effective, the film does a good job of not over sensationalizing the lesbian aspects of the story, and the directors do manage to keep the look of the film interesting - even if the film itself isn't.

Followed by Wishing Stairs. (Chris Hartley, 8/2/05)

Directed By: Tae-Yong Kim, Kyu-Dong Min.
Written By: Tae-Yong Kim, Kyu-Dong Min.

Starring: Min-Sun Kim, Yeh-Jin Park, Young-Jin Lee, Jong-Hak Baek.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: Tartan brings Memento Mori to DVD looking pretty decent and it's a better transfer than the Whispering Corridors disc as clarity is pretty solid throughout and grain/dirt only shows-up a few times. Perfectly acceptable stuff.

Extras: There's a trailer (plus trailers for Whispering Corridors, Koma, A Tale Of Two Sisters, Heroic Duo, and Oldboy), a photo gallery, a music video that cuts scenes from the film with footage of the score's recording session, and a decent "making of" featurette that runs 25 minutes (it's in Korean with English subtitles).