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Review

Wishing Stairs is the third installment in the “Whispering Corridors” series. Again we have a Korean, all-girls, private boarding school. Again we have hordes of teenagers in tightly tailored uniforms, abusive to the outcasts. Again we have an illicit, unfulfilled, lesbian love affair. If it’s starting to sound a bit formulaic, that’s ok, because this formula seems to work.

There are 28 stairs that lead to the school’s residence hall. If you count each step aloud as you climb them, a 29th step will appear and a fox spirit will grant whatever you a wish. In pretty standard parable style, nice people get their desires fulfilled sans schadenfreude. Girls without the noblest intentions behind their wish, well there seem to be some evil strings attached. As you may expect, no one at the school is that nice.

So-Hee and Jin-Sung are ballerinas. Hae-Ju is an awkward, overweight sculpture student. So-Hee loves Jin-Sung. Hae-Ju loves So-Hee. Sexual advances are refused. Wishes are made on the stairs. There are some disquieting scenes of pink-stocking clad, leg only, toe-shoe shots; complete with squishy sound effects and blood. So-Hee is the shoe-in to win a ballet competition and go to Russia to perform. Jin-Sung wishes that she be the one who wins. As you might expect, the granting of the latter’s wish doesn’t work out to well for the former. You probably can guess what the fat girl wishes for first. It’s what she wishes for next, for So-Hee to return to her after jumping out of the hospital window that brings on the ghost and the violence and the killing and the scariness.

The ghost is much more frightening in this film, compared to the relatively nice one in Memento Mori. Face is white, eyes are black. Arachnid movements as she crawls in and out of rooms, around the basement and in the performance hall recall much of the new Asian horror that’s currently popular. On a side note, muting the sound and putting on the spookier side of Aphex Twin’s “Ambient Masterworks Volume Two” as the haunting hits high gear and the editing becomes almost music video works quite nicely.

This is not a feel good ghost movie. There is no resolution or forgiveness or everlasting love from beyond the grave. The spirit is evil. It wants to possess and kill and punish. Prepare to be more frightened than you were in this trilogies previous installment.

 -- Mark Sconyers