SCREAMBOX Exclusive religious horror anthology Body Parts makes a sacrifice on July 30. The South Korean film follows a young reporter to a mysterious ceremony in which five stories are offered by people who desperately wait to be heard by their god.

Anthology stories can be a lot of fun. They give creators a chance to cooperate and work together to see how their styles mesh together, and they allow one movie a chance to play around with moods and and genres. It can really be a fun experiment if done well. One of my favorite all time horror movies, Trick ‘R Treat, is an anthology picture!

The new South Korean horror anthology Body Parts centers itself on a story about a reporter infiltrating what appears to be a religious cult. She gets more and more caught up in her surroundings as she waits for help from the outside in determine what is going on within their secret gathering. In the meantime, we are treated to the backstory behind all of the gifts that are brought to the strange being known only as Father in the hopes of waking him up. The five tales interspersed throughout the movie give this history.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The easiest part of anthologies is always giving them Ups and Downs, because there are going to be stories that are better than some and worse than others. So you go through, mark down what stories did stuff that worked, which ones did stuff that didn’t, and bam! There’s my Ups and Downs set for the feature. So simple!

For Body Parts, the first Up was pretty definitively the last story, the fifth anthology tale (not counting the conclusion to the overarching tale of the whole movie), called String. This last story arc opens with a man waking up to several alarms going off in his apartment. When he tries to get to the alarm on his phone, he finds there is a wire tied around his neck… and it’s connected through the wall to his next door neighbor’s neck, as well!

This story feels less supernatural than the others (until the very end), and has the added tension factor of a mysterious timer going off in each victim’s apartment, though they have no idea what happens when the clock runs out. It’s a very tense tale that struck me more than the others, but then again, I have a very sensitive gag reflex, and the idea of a wire being tied around my neck is enough to send chills all over me. So I was an easy mark for String.

It feels very Saw-inspired, too, so if that’s your thing, you’re sure to be a big fan of this short segment of Body Parts.

+ The third story is the tale of two girls who appear to be college-aged as they seek to prove their friend is possessed by a demon so they can get an exorcist to come out and save her. They film and livestream all of the activity in the room in which they have locked her up. In the meantime, they’ve done their homework and have memorized Biblical passages and rites so that they can do their best to help out.

This arc has a brilliant ending where the demon ultimately outsmarts her captors and keeps them from ever learning its name in an extremely clever (and thematic for the overall story of the movie) way. But that’s not to say that the road there, all told through screens like in Searching… and Missing, is not equally well-handled and creepy.

After the fifth entry, this was my second favorite of the film.

– Probably the worst story of Body Parts is the second, about a young man being tortured by those around him because he can see ghosts. It opens with their dunking his head in a barrel of water, and they berate and attack him from there… until he promises to help them see the ghosts, as well. That goes about as well for them as you can imagine, and there is one slick ghosts who is very reminiscent of Michael Myers.

The problem with the second tale is mostly in the execution. The editing is choppy and poor across the effort, and it’s the hardest story to follow as you are trying to enjoy it. The cuts don’t seem to make a lot of sense, and they leap to moments that don’t always feel that tied together. It’s probably not as bad as I’m making it out to be, but there were definitely bits that took me out of the movie because of the editing choices they made.

– The last Down goes not to any of the other stories (though the ending to the fifth tale and the whole of the fourth were in consideration). I’m actually giving it to the translation effort of Body Parts. The subtitles I had weren’t exactly nonsensical–and the film was coherent–but there were a great many times where the translation was definitely “off”, worded weirdly, or the whole idea of what they were trying to say was a lost in translation effect. In a horror movie of all things, I don’t want to have to disengage from the film to figure out what the words on the screen are trying to tell me, you know?

OVERALL

Body Parts is an effective horror anthology with a solid over-arching story and some fun short tales spread throughout. It would maybe be a bit nicer if the anthology stories felt a little more dissimilar from one another–they all have the same mood and ideas–but I get not wanting to buck the convention of the core arc, too. I do wish the translation/subtitles had been done a little better, but overall it’s a good international outing.