Official Synopsis:
When an insurance investigator arrives at the scene of his latestcase, a run-down house in the middle of nowhere, he discovers a little boy hanging from the ceiling. The child's father is eager for insurance compensation, while the frail, grieving mother bears signs of physical abuse on her body. The police close the case as suicide, but the insurance investigator suspects foul play and fears that the mother may be the next target. Projecting his own troubled past into  the case, he soon discovers the shocking repercussions of digging too deep.

  
Our Take:
Five minutes in to Black House and I thought to myself, “Hey at least the film is shot well.” Ten minutes in and I was thinking, “Hmm… maybe it’s actually scripted pretty well, too.” Thirty minutes in and we had the workings of a good thriller in action. From there on out things only got better, or at least stayed just as taut as they had been.

As you can probably guess Black House suffers from having DVD cover art that doesn’t let the audience know what kind of a movie this is. The cover we see tells us it’s going to be some sort of slasher flick set in a creepy old house. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, nothing really happens in said house until the last third of the film (at which point there is a very tense 20 minute stand-off with no dialogue). It’s not only the bad DVD art here; it’s also the title. Black House is an awful title for this film and I can’t imagine that this is what the original title translates to (the film is Korean). It makes sense in a vague way, but again it doesn’t really offer the viewers any clue as to what the film is truly about.

Black House is actually all about life insurance and one family’s stake to seemingly acquire as much of it as they can. And they do it in almost a perfect way as the police and the insurance company as a whole are willing to give them the money. But that’s where our protagonist comes into play; Juno (a male insurance rep) believes he sees this family for what they truly are.

Special features include:

* Truth About Psychopaths: The Making Of Black House (21 minutes) – A solid making-of with some talk about why psychopath films are popular in Korea.

* Secret Of Black House: Production Design Featurette (7 minutes).

* Deleted Scenes (20 minutes).

This movie is the definition of what building tension should feel like. It does so the whole way through and at almost a perfect rate. The movie falters a bit towards the end; much like Return Of The King and its infinite number of endings, Black House has three separate and fulfilling endings of its own. And while they’re all informative and tie up any loose ends, it gets to a point where we feel like they just should have stopped the movie by now. Still, don’t let that stop you from checking out this otherwise creepy thriller.

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Overall Picture:
Movie: B+
DVD: B-

- Landen Chase Pelish
Staff Writer