This is supposed to be a horror movie but it's not really scary. It has some suspense however which can make it worth watching and it's more like a gory slasher similar to "Scream" than a ghost story. Having said that I'm not excluding any ghostly presence in the movie. It's simply up to you to find out. The actors are good, at least the main characters but the rest is just average.

The big disappointment comes later in the movie when the director is trying to tie everything together. The script just fails to make a trustworthy impression and you are suddenly very aware that you are only watching a movie when the characters starts behaving in weird ways and doesn't act at all how you would expect them to in their current situation.

Unexpected events are good in horror movies but not in this case, where it's only confusing but like I said in the beginning, the suspense is there so it's not really a bad movie.

Seeing how this movie did so well in Korean box office, I thought it would be pretty good. It's not really a horror flick, but sort of works like the "Saw" movies except not the victims but the students that still hasn't been kidnapped yet has to solve the puzzles in order to save there classmate. My guess is that there wasn't many Korean horror movies released during that year, and since Asians tends to crave horror flicks it did so well. Although the premise is pretty well done, none of the characters seem to stand out much and you just don't care who lives and who dies. None of them were believable and the character decisions don't make sense sometimes, there just isn't any logic. Plus everything about this movie seems to be rushed, especially the ending, the twist also wasn't that shocking or original. But what annoyed me the most was the cliché, it's safe to be in one area but a person can take it anymore or goes off to investigate when the person they leave behind is the one that really needs help, which tends to get annoying since it gets used way too much in this. Although I ain't really looking forward to the sequel to this, I hope it's better than this although sequels tend to suck.

5.3/10

The 2008 South Korean horror movie was off to an interesting start, but then everything just came crashing hard fast and irrevocably.

And there wasn't much that director Hong-Seung Yoon could manage to do to salvage the movie, because the movie suffered from having a dubious and questionable storyline from writers Hong-Seung Yoon and Eun-Kyeong Kim.

The events in the movie made little sense, and there definitely was no logic to what transpired throughout the course of the movie. And what would deter the students from simply leaving the school grounds in opposite directions, and what would the killer do about that? And the total lack of action on the character's behalf was just appalling.

The acting in the movie was adequate, but it was hardly enough to make up for the shortcomings of the movie.

For a South Korean horror movie, then the 2008 movie "Death Bell" (aka "Gosa") was just a swing and a miss. It was boring, mundane and rather stupid, to be bluntly honest. This makes me somewhat doubtful about about sitting down to watch the 2010 sequel any time soon.

My rating of "Death Bell" lands on a mere, although quite generous, three out of ten stars. This is hardly worth the time, effort or money, and there are far better horror movies readily available in the South Korean cinema.