Ha Ji-won in Secret

AN AWKWARD FIT
Before Damo created a new kind of heroine for Ha Ji-won to play, she seemed to have been regarded primarily as a character actor and not as a potential leading lady. One of her earliest roles was the second lead in the influential time-fractured romance Ditto. In the successful TV drama Secret (Bimil, 2002) Ha had the "bad girl" role, a troublemaking tea-haired teenaged vamp and pathological liar who makes a play for her sister's boyfriend. She was shoehorned into the commercial genres upon which Korean film and television were pinning their hopes, when the industry was still fighting for domestic market share against U.S., Japanese, and Hong Kong imports. At that stage it played a lot of safe bets, turning out a spate of copycat post-Ring horror movies, for example.

SELLING FILMS LIKE CARS
I remember once watching an interview, possibly on 60 Minutes, in which an executive from Hyundai or Kia explained that Korean tycoons had carefully studied the methods used in the 1980s by Honda and Toyota to break into the U.S. auto market (basically sending over their cheapest models first, priced at a loss to establish a toehold, then gradually introducing their more expensive brands) and had copied that strategy to the letter with cars that were "even cheaper but not quite as good." The early Korean ghost movies strike me as the exact film-industry equivalent of those loss-leader automobiles. And, to an extent, the plan worked: These were the films that established the street cred of Korean films with fanboys in the U.S., even before cult favorites such as Attack the Gas Station and Oldboy came along; they also helped to draw in such connoisseurs of Asian extremity as the dedicated trend-followers at Britain's Tartan Video. (When director Larry Clark punched the company's founder, Hamish McAlpine in the mouth, some of us cheered.)

NIGHTMARE AND PHONE
One of the earliest of these Ring rip-offs, Nightmare (Gawi, 2000), was the third film I didn't remember having seen (mostly on fast-forward the first time) until I was well into it. Ha Ji-won makes her entrance as a blue-tinted topless corpse on a slab in a morgue — before rising again as a face-shredding vengeful white-faced ghost garbed in a black goth outfit. (She makes a much stronger impression in the movie's I Know What You Did flashbacks, as a sweet wallflower bullied by a clique of rich kids.) The film is a completists-only horror item, with only a few good jolts, but if you do take the trouble to go looking for it, insist on the superb-looking Korean disc, which is far superior to the murky full-frame Hong Kong edition from Universe — which isn't even "uncut" as advertised (a goopy close-up of an eye-gouging is the most obvious trim). The domestic release from Tokyo Shock has not yet been experienced.

Ha re-teamed with her Nightmare director, Ahn Byeong-ki, a few years later on the even more Ring-like Phone (Pon, 2002), in which her role was upgraded from the glassy-eyed killer ghost to the alert and intrepid reporter investigating the vengeful ghost. More stalwart than a conventional scream queen, Ha still seems wasted in this essentially reactive role, which has her edging slowly into a series of dark rooms and widening her eyes over what she finds there. The final shot has a good left-field plot twist, with a nod to E.A. Poe, but it's a long, slow trip getting there.