The subject of the cursed movie or film in horror cinema is a rather played out and frequent trope in modern cinema, with everything from “Cigarette Burns,” “Porno” and “Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made” to name a few of the films utilizing the concept. This lack of originality extends to the rest of director Kim Jin-won's competently-made if overall generic Amjeon, now available on Shudder.
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Working on her thesis project in film school, Mi-jung (Seo Ye-ji) decides to transfer the focus onto a new horror film when one of her classmates informs her about a cursed movie shot by a legacy student. Informed about what happened to the original director and crew that shot the movie, she and her friend Joon-seo (Ji Yoon-ho) begin to investigate the legacy of the tape and discover the truth involving what happened to Jae-hyun (Jin Seon-kyu), the director and sole surviving member of the original crew. Contacting him for information, she's drawn into a dark web of supernatural incidents and ghostly hauntings based on the long-believed-secret incident Jae-hyun used as inspiration for his own film and warns that what happened to him will soon happen to Mi-jung.
Overall, “Warning: Do Not Play” is a pretty solid effort. One of the strongest elements here is the folklore and backstory given to the particular film. Writer/director Jin-won provides a lot of detail that helps to make the narrative fun. Though the concept of the cursed film driving people insane when they watch it is nothing new, the setup of the individual tormented to live out the rest of his life as a paranoid, deranged lunatic for filming and releasing what he did which starts the spread of the rumors involving the film and its legacy afterward, works quite nicely.
That ties nicely into the other solid positive, the film's supernatural elements. The opening sequence of the figure stalking a character through a darkened car-park using a cellphone camera for light is a chilling and pretty creepy sequence, while the encounter with the frantic former director in his house is a nice segment. The changing lights, crazed behavior and frantic attacks to get at her all set the stage for the final half, where the return to the abandoned, fire-ravaged theater which features plenty of tactics from recreations of the original incidents to her own encounters with the ghost that has some solid action, gives this one a lot to like.
On the other hand, the biggest letdown is the series of investigations that are taking place in the first half. Here the pace is so dragged out and slow to get going that there are several start-and-stop plot-points added. The meetup with the various film-students who spill the urban legend about the movie to Mi-jung, the different instructors at the film-centers she talks with to learn the truth about the movie or the searches around the university grounds trying to find it, are all necessary to understand what's going on yet just don't have the urgency needed to help drive the film out.
The other problem is with the seemingly cursed movie that's supposed to drive Mi-jung insane yet barely materializes. Very rarely does anything in here make sense. These elements range from how the psychological strain of attempting to find out how anything worked on the original shoot which causes her to be tormented by the forces who worked on it. As well, there's the sudden introduction of morality into the story and all the background characters from the filming being involved. In the end, this one is confusing and quite chaotic to make out what's going on. Coupled with some cheap make-up effects from time-to-time, these are where the film stumbles.
Despite some enjoyable segments here and there, the majority of “Warning: Do Not Play” is filled with confusing missteps and underwhelming ideas that undo a lot of those aspects and lower this one pretty significantly.
