[The Wishing Stairs]
Plot: A staircase leading to the dormitory of a remote boarding school usually has 28 stairs, but every so often there appears to be 29. When someone steps on the mysterious extra stair, the horror begins.

Cast: Ji-hyo Song, Han-byeol Park, An Jo, Ji-Yeon Park.

My Thoughts:Starts with a whimper....ends with a bang.

Review:Decided to give this Korean horror pic a watch recently and I was pleasantly surprised. The movie is set at college where a class of young girls are competing for an opportunity to go to a ballet school in Russia (why Russia of all places is never explained). Anyhow, one girl in particular named Yun Ji-seong doesn't believe hrself to be as pretty as the others because she's slightly larger. With no way to rectify the situation in quick fix fashion, she clings to an urban legend about a staircase behind the school which has been deemed through lore as "The Wishing Stairs".

The legend surrounding the staircase is that it has 28 steps, but every now and then a 29th one appears. Should you be lucky enough to be on the staircase when the 29th step appears, you get to make a wish and it'll be granted. Yun gets her wish, but it isn't long before she learns that wishes come with a price. "The Wishing Stairs" is very similar to the legend of the Monkey's Paw, and blends that urban legend with a little bit of "Pet Semetary". which states that it has the power to grant anyones wishes upon being asked, but in order to do so a tragedy has to befall someone else, so as to balance out the universe.

Jae-yeon Yun's film plays off of this legend extremely well. Using the ominous staircase as a perfect stand in for the evil object which is causing all of the supernatural mayhem. Yun Ji-seong get's her wish, but one of her classmates, and incidentally her best friend Kim So-hie meets a tragic end soon afterwards in a car accident. Of course Yun has no knowledge that the evil power of the wishing stairs was what caused the accident, so she returns to the stairs yet again and asks for another wish, this time wanting the return of her friend Kim So-hie. Kim does come back, but as a vengeful spirit who terrorizes every girl at the school.

This film caught me by surprise because it really does an excellent job of lulling you in at the beginning making you believe that it's going to move along at a slow, sometimes boring pace for the duration. Although every movie needs time to set up the story and build relationships between characters, "The Wishing Stairs" takes far too much time not really going anywhere in the first act and a large chunk of act two. But what transpires late in act two and then in act three is a total about face, as the movie becomes very dark, ominous, moody, and suspenseful...but most of all entertaining.

Not surprisingly, this is when the "new" Kim So-hie returns to plague the girls at her school and even kills a few of them. The picture also delves out some creepy moments between a back from the dead So-hie and her frightened ex friend Ji-seong, where So-hie seems to be conflicted with the evil misdeeds that she's carrying out from beyond the grave. But these moments come off more as diturbing and creepy instead of emotional or campy. The films ending is the perfect cap on what starts out as a possible time waster, and ends as a very chilling Korean horror pic. "The Wishing Stairs"...albeit a tale of two halves, is still a foreign horror pic worth seeing.

Positives:Great performances by all involved, a very scary second half and chilling ending.

Negatives:A first half that was too slow and lacked scares.

Overall:Worth seeing atleast once.





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