The original Whispering Corridors was released around the same period as Ringu, which sparked a glut of films of the psycho-horror genre. Whispering Corridors was the first in the Corridors series, though not neccesarily the best.
There’s a cold draught flowing through the dark and empty corridors of an girls school, where a doting teacher falls victim to her death under mysterious circumstances. The death is considered a suicide and is the talk of the school. Thing start to look bleak when another teacher is killed, and a teacher who was previously a student starts to unravel the mysterious links between the deaths and her own past.
I probably made the film sound more interesting than it really was. The friendship between two school girls is well handled, convincing that their initial dislike and trepedation of each other soon develops into a bond of friendship and trust.
Most of the film, however, is a bit of a bore. The mannerisms, and the acting are all good, but the script is weak and full of holes. It also fails to give any substance to the ghost, or history to pour out sympathy, Instead we’re given opinions offered as fact, and that’s all you’re getting, which is a shame as the recurring ghost was rather intriguing,
If you’re looking for fear, or Ringu style brilliance and panache, you won’t find it here. This really sat on the bandwagon and honked it’s horn. There’s one interesting scene where a seance is attempted in a classroom.
The seance was the focus of another film, Bunshinsaba, that turns this into an entire film. You can guess then how wafer thin the plot for this film is, and how flimsy of the genre is in terms of quality, when output seems to be par for course over substance.
Repeated use, and indeed abuse, of the dimly lit corridors, music video methods of ghostly movement, and claps of thunder and lightning do nothing of adding atmosphere to a film severly lacking it.
It certainly doesn’t go guns blazing with the gore or deaths, and does try to weave a story, but it feels like a lot of small ideas that were never fully developed. You get the sense that they wanted to fit as many aspects as possible in to the 100 minutes of film, but in doing so you’re engaged but confused most of the time.
Talk of the scares, there’s very few. I tell a lie, there are none in fact. For a film that uses the horror tag, it doesn’t provide any horror. You could argue that the schooling system perhpas was the biggest horror, on how it segregated the top students from the ones that are a bit thick.
Perhaps that was the focus of the film, in which case there should have been more of a resolution as it doesn’t quite offer enough in terms of the cause and effect. The film simply displays scenarios without explanations, which make it hard to appreciate what the director and script writers intentions are.
Whispering Corridors is weaker than it’s fellow siblings, but far better than the latest installment. Although the entire series is rather lacking in the horror department, spending the time watching the entire series would be a waste of time. The series went for more plot later on, with each film having a different director and script writer. This isn’t a bad film, there’s far worse out there, but the lack of character exploration is a definite minus which takes a lot away from what could have been a pretty good film. In the end, it’s simply average.
Verdict: Disappointing first movie. Too many small ideas lead to prolonged sentences of boredom