Will you flip for The Wig? Perhaps, but it helps if you're a true Asian horror fan who isn't tired of seeing yet another inanimate object possessed by an evil and vengeful spirit. People always joke about those creepy Asian girl ghosts with the long black hair. Well, this time around they leave out the girl part and just work with the hair.

We begin in a Seoul cancer ward, where Su-Hyeon (Min-seo Chae) is terminally ill with leukemia. Her sister Ji-Hyeon (Seon Yu), who has been taking care of her, brings her a wig and prepares to take her home to die, but she decides to let Su-Hyeon think she's cured rather than tell her the ugly truth. Strangely, once the wig is on, the sickly Su-Hyeon looks and feels better, so good, in fact, that she goes after her sister's ex-boyfriend Ki-Seok and gets the urge to start hitting the clubs and have some fun. At the same time, Ji-Hyeon is experiencing a number of increasingly gruesome hallucinations, the kinds of murders and injuries by impalement that are typical in J-horror and K-horror flicks. She's coming undone. As for the wig itself, it has a tendency to attempt to crawl across the floor when left alone, an unnerving sight to say the least.

If you're willing to buy the premise up to this point, then you'll stick around for the inevitable human vs. wig final showdown, and if scissors won't do the trick, perhaps a conveniently located canister of gasoline will come in handy. How do you get rid of a haunted wig? It's harder than you think.

The Wig may be built on a silly premise, but the production is slick, with plenty of that monochromatic spookiness we've all become accustomed to since the very first Ring movie. The ambient sound is decidedly creepy, and you never know when the next flash of a maggoty corpse is coming. Min-seo Chae deserves some kind of award not only for shaving her head but also for losing an incredible amount of weight to play her role. Not since Christian Bale in The Machinist has there been an emaciated body like this on screen. Good work, Min-seo, now get something to eat.

Aka Gabal.



Hair's lookin' at you, kid.