So... looking for more good Korean movies?

Sunday’s Oscar upset was not only an overdue recognition of Bong Joon Ho, who has been making superlative films ever since 2003’s Memories of Murder¸ but also of the South Korean movie industry as a whole, which has long been one of world cinema’s most reliable producers of compelling commercial cinema.

For those of you now on the hunt for other quality Korean films or recent vintage, I can of course offer the same list of relatively recent hits that any Asian cinema fan will give you: JSA; The Good, The Bad, and The Weird; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance; Snowpiercer; Old Boy; A Bittersweet Life; The Handmaiden; I Saw the Devil; Siri, etc. But I can also offer you a sampling of classic Korean films that are marked by the same combination of casual violence, personal drama and mordant humor that would seem to be a kind of stylistic trademark of Korean cinema as a whole.

The Housemaid (Dir: Kim Ki-Young, 1960). Kim Ki-Young’s insane tale of a model nuclear family exploded by the intrusion of an unhinged young woman into their carefully managed domestic sphere. An oft-referenced classic of Korean cinema.

A Devilish Homicide, aka A Bloodthirsty Killer (Dir: Lee Yong-Min, 1965). A chilling noir nightmare that slides between family horror and crime drama.

Devil! Take the Train to Hell! (Dir: No-shik Park, 1977) A stylish, Japanese-set revenge drama from actor/director No-shik Park. Here Park plays a blind musician who roams the back streets of Tokyo in the wee hours, using his preternatural martial arts abilities to exact revenge against the four former Japanese soldiers who robbed him of his sight and murdered his wife. Bo-Yeong Ahn makes a colorful sidekick as a similarly empowered village girl out for revenge against the same men.

Iodo, aka Io Island (Dir: Kim Ki-Young, 1977) Housemaid director Kim Ki-Young once again explores the realms of the sexes as alien spheres, this time by placing a beleaguered male protagonist within an isolated community of women. It’s a story that owes a seeming debt to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, though it’s injected with enough of Kim’s own labyrinthine weirdness to make it indelibly his own.

A Woman Chases the Butterfly of Death (Dir:Kim Ki-Young, 1978) Kim Ki-Young returns with this surreal rumination on death, possession and butterfly collecting.

The Hand of Fate (Dir: Han Hyeong-Mo, 1954) An interesting hybrid; part tragic romance, part political allegory, part spy thriller and part anti-communist propaganda. Made at a time when Korean cinema, along with Korean society as a whole, was struggling back toward recovery after the Korean War. It was, while not a commercial success, a technical step forward in terms of its crisp editing and challenging bifurcated structure. Not to mention that it featured Korea’s first onscreen kiss.

We cult cinema fanatics are nothing if not covetous, so I have to admit that, as one of many scribes who have been championing Korean popular cinema for years now, I have to admit to feeling a bit bereft now that Sunday’s Oscars has let the cat out of the bag. Sadly, Korean cinema is no longer the treasured little secret of myself and a few other like-minded film geeks—and that’s as it should be. Any commercial cinema as artful, technically accomplished, and bearing such a unique perspective as this deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.

Get in the holiday spirit with Podcast On Fire

Kenny B has just posted his annual Christmas episode over at Podcast on Fire. This one features Ken, me, and fellow co-hosts Paul Quinn and Tom K-W cutting up and waxing eloquent about all things Asian cinema, including Bong Joon Ho's Parasite and the upcoming Blu-ray release of Kim Ki-Young's masterpiece of insanity Woman Chasing a Killer Butterfly. Pour yourself a cup of  day-old eggnog and give it a listen, won't you?

A Devilish Homicide, aka A Bloodthirsty Killer (South Korea, 1965)

On paper, A Devilish Homicide (also known as A Bloodthirsty Killer and, in its home country, Salinma) tells what is more or less a boilerplate Asian ghost story. There is the vengeful spirit of a wronged woman—sheathed in white, of course, and with her eerily glaring countenance peeking out from behind a veil of long black hair—who, as the years have taught us to expect, spends the bulk of the movie systematically picking off all of those responsible for her demise. In practice, however, the film is a great example of how an oft-told tale, when told inventively, can take on a vibrant new life.

For the first half of A Devilish Homicide, director Lee Yong-min seems to have dropped us into the middle of a Lynch-ean nightmare, piling on one disturbing visual non sequitur on top of another until, very gradually, a story starts to coalesce. This story, once it comes into view, is an anxious one of a middle class family unit so plagued by both mysterious outside forces and byzantine internal intrigues that it is impossible not to compare it to Kim Ki-Young’s landmark The Housemaid, made five years earlier. As in other rapidly modernizing Asian societies in the 1960s, the state of the traditional family appears to have been an abiding concern for Koreans at the time.

The film begins with well-to-do businessman Lee Shi-mak (Lee Ye-chun) making a late night visit to a deserted gallery, where he finds on the wall a red-tinted portrait of a woman whom he immediately recognizes. Much later, we will learn that this woman is Ae-ja (Do Kum-bong), Shi-mak’s ex-wife, who disappeared ten years earlier—but, for the time being, Yong-min leaves us to piece this together for ourselves.

Shi-mak takes the painting from the wall, only to have the image melt away before his eyes. He then flees the building and hops into a cab. Shi-mak wants to go home, but the disfigured cab driver has ideas of his own, taking his increasingly uneasy passenger out into the countryside. The driver warns Shi-mak that the night is alive with vengeful spirits and, to illustrate that fact, we are shown a dawn-lit forest teeming with white garbed female forms. This haunting image, presaging Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, is one of many in A Devilish Homicide that will stick with you long afterward.

Eventually the driver lets Shi-mak off at another apparently abandoned building, the interior of which, as rendered by Hong Jun-Mun’s noirish cinematography, is a foreboding maze of shadows. There he stumbles into the apartment of an artist, who happens to be in possession of the painting of Ae-ja and insists that Shi-mak take it. Before he can make his exit—or find out what the actual fuck is going on—the clock strikes midnight and the murderous spirit of Ae-jun appears at the artist’s door, dagger in hand. Hiding under the bed, Shi-mak watches fearfully as the ghost overcomes the artist and stabs him in the back. He then escapes from the building, only to be pursued by the cab driver, who now seems to have murder on his mind.

Taking shelter in yet another expressionistic ruin, Shi-mak crashes through the rotting floorboards into the shadowy crawlspace. There he finds the supine body of Ae-jun, unaged since her disappearance, in an apparent state of suspended animation. He takes her to his doctor friend, Park, who clearly recognizes her and is just as startled as Shi-mak to see her. He examines her while all the while exclaiming that it is impossible for her to be alive. Except that she is—although, when Park puts a stethoscope to her chest, all he hears is science fiction-y electronic noises.

Now, at this point in A Devilish Homicide, there have been many opportunities for the screen to go all watery and for Shi-mak to sit bolt upright in bed and scream—in the manner all movies seem to think we awaken from bad dreams even though none of us do ever. Even Shi-mak—who is wandering through the abandoned streets of the city in the middle of the night why, exactly?—repeatedly exclaims that he must be having a nightmare. This conviction is bolstered by the languid horror of all that has happened so far, which is more than a little reminiscent of the similarly dream-like Carnival of Souls. Even a devotee of outré cinema such as me, who should have been conditioned by my viewings of other deeply strange Korean movies like Woman after a Killer Butterfly, surrendered to the expectation that all of these improbable events would eventually be ascribed to night terrors. However, this was not to be the case.

Shi-mak leaves Ae-jun with Dr. Park and returns home to his family, an idyllic unit consisting of his wife, his mother and his three children. Ae-jun, who has murdered Park immediately upon waking up, is not far behind, and soon the family's bonds are tested by a series of horrific encounters. First, Shi-mak’s mom walks into the forest to pray at a Buddhist shrine and is attacked by Ae-jun, who growls and hisses like a cat. We see her getting pushed into the river and swallowed by the current, and she is missing long enough to be feared dead. Grandma nonetheless returns, albeit with a few add-ons. In one particularly hard to un-see scene, she finds her two youngest grandchildren asleep in their shared bed and starts compulsively licking their faces.

In another harrowing sequence, Ae-jun reaches in through a bedroom window and snatches Shi-mak’s teenage daughter up onto the roof of the house. Her mother desperately tries to reach the roof, but the rickety ladder she is using starts to buck and sway dangerously in the wind. All the while, her daughter’s screams of terror and agony pierce the soundtrack. Meanwhile, grandma (in a toweringly creepy performance by a Korean actress whom I sadly cannot identify) continues to behave in an increasingly sinister manner. Suspicious, Shi-mak spies on her and witnesses her grooming herself in the mirror, licking her hand and then pulling it back across her hair. Looking back at her from the mirror is the reflection of a cat. Shi-mak barges in on her and a struggle ensues. His mother dies, leaving in her place a dead cat wearing a tiny robe.

When Shi-mak, in a fit of rage, destroys the portrait of Ae-jun, he finds hidden within it the artist’s diary. In it, the artist describes the murder plot that lead to poor Ae-jun’s demise. Suffice it to say that it’s a scheme that’s every bit as absurd as it is vicious. He also describes aspects of Ae-jun’s sad and lonely death that he could not possibly have known about. Soon thereafter, a mysterious young woman appears at Shi-mak’s home and offers to become the family’s maid. She gives Shi-mak a third eye taken from one of the Buddhist shrine’s idols for protection. This he will repeatedly throw at Ae-jun like a mystical superball in their final confrontation.

A Devilish Homicide is a strange film, but strange only in the best way possible--while being at the same time relentlessly, oppressively creepy. It is also a film that could prove instructive to the current generation of commercial filmmakers, some of whom think that making a genre film is simply a matter of faithfully rolling out a catalog of established tropes and familiar plot points. This practice results in boring and unimaginative genre films that make people like me sad. As an alternative, what A Devilish Homicide demonstrates is that every story, no matter how hackneyed, offers a myriad of potential drop pins from which it can be told—and, depending how far those pins venture from a conventional perspective, told interestingly. In fact, the earlier reference to David Lynch is appropriate here, as so many of his movies, like A Devilish Homicide, contain within them conventional genre films that have been fractured almost beyond recognition.

In the case of A Devilish Homicide, we eventually find that, despite him being positioned as the protagonist, the story is not that of Shi-mak at all. Shi-mak was neither an actor in the plot against Ae-jun nor privy to it, which means that the story of A Devilish Homicide is really that of Ae-jun, an innocent who suffered tragically at the hands of her conniving loved ones and ended up a spirit walking the earth in search of vengeance. If the movie had been made in Indonesia, Ae-jun would be the central character--and portrayed by Suzzanna.

Instead, Lee Yong-min drops us into the middle of a businessman’s nightmare and lets us struggle out of that toward the film’s true heart. Although it’s forcing of a male perspective might merely be the result of patriarchal imperative, its central tale, like that of most Suzanna films, is one of man’s inhumanity to women.

Iodo, aka Io Island (South Korea, 1977)

With Iodo, Kim Ki-Young, director of The Housemaid and Woman After a Killer Butterfly, once again explores the realms of the sexes as alien spheres, this time placing a beleaguered male protagonist within an isolated community of women. It’s a story that owes a seeming debt to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, though injected with enough of Kim’s labyrinthine weirdness to make it indelibly his own.

Kim Jeong-cheol plays Sun Wu-hyun, an ad man who, at the film’s opening, stages a cruise for a boatload of journalists as a publicity stunt to promote a new hotel. When Sun announces that the cruise’s destination is to be Iodo, not only the name of the hotel but also a mythical island known for capturing the spirits of male fishermen, one of the passengers, a young journo by the name of Cheon Nam-Seok (Choi Yun-seok) becomes agitated, accusing the exec of mocking the legends of his people. That evening, Cheon goes missing from the ship after a sharp exchange with Sun, who ends up being suspected of foul play in the matter. When it’s later learned that the young man hailed from a remote island where many men were fabled to have been claimed by Iodo, including those from successive generations of Cheon’s family, Sun, accompanied by Cheon’s editor, sets off to the island to investigate and, hopefully, clear his name.

That Island, Parang, turns out to be inhabited solely by women, though it’s far from the amazonian utopias we so often see depicted in B movies. Those men who have not been taken by Iodo have had to flee the island in order to escape its curse, leaving the women to subsist on what they can make by diving along its shores. Unfortunately, that proves to be an increasingly fruitless pursuit, as the accelerating pollution of the waters has decimated the island’s sea life. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Cheon, despite leaving Parang, was drawn back to it on more than one occasion, and on the last time, in an attempt to stave off famine, squandered thousands of dollars of the islander’s money on an abalone farm that ultimately failed.

At the same time, the women of the island have a fertility problem beyond that of having no men to procreate with. The onus for solving this falls upon Parang’s resident shaman, who conducts a series of rites to affect the return from the sea of those recently claimed by Iodo. It is believed, apparently, that only the still valid sperm of these freshly dead can successfully impregnate their widowed women. To this end, Sun’s arrival finds the Shaman petitioning the spirits to deliver Cheon’s corpse, which leads to Iodo’s dramatic crescendo incorporating a surprisingly graphic depiction of necrophilia.

Where Iodo comes down in terms of the veracity of its supernatural content I’ll leave for you to discover. Though I will say that, if it’s not a horror film, it’s indeed a deeply disquieting one. Its tone is one achieved more through the use of stillness and incongruous beauty than the occasional jolt. As such, the simmering malignancy of the island women’s deteriorating collective mindset is made all the more so by the breathtaking setting against which it takes place, the wide expanse of blue ocean surrounding them as much an isolating barrier as a promise of escape. At the same time, the women’s growing suspicion of the two male visitors becomes a source of ever increasing tension, threatening to explode in ways that those of us familiar with The Wicker Man find too easy to imagine. (Oh no! Not the bees! -- sorry, I meant the other Wicker Man.)

All of the above makes Iodo a bit of a slow burner, requiring more patience than other of Kim Ki-Young’s films -- such as, say, Woman After a Killer Butterfly, which practically pulls your eyes out with its ever increasing piling on of what-the-fuckery. But if you want to be left haunted by your cinema experience, here’s your ticket. Of the Kim films I’ve seen, this one made me see most clearly his influence upon the directors of Korea’s contemporary new wave -- in particular Kim Ki-Duk, whose 2000 The Isle showcases a similar intermingling of the poetic and the grotesque. True, Iodo’s eerily mournful conclusion might leave you shaking your head, but, as with that other Kim’s film, you’ll be doing so more in hopes of preventing it from making a home in your subconscious than out of incredulity.

(Iodo can be streamed free online via the Korean Film Archive's YouTube channel.)

A Woman After a Killer Butterfly (South Korea, 1978)

While picnicking in the forest with his classmates, college student Young-gul (Kim Chung-chul) takes off in pursuit of a butterfly. After trapping the insect in his net, he then kills it with an injection of poison. A strange woman sitting in the clearing nearby chastises him for the hubris of this act, stating further that a human’s death is every bit as insignificant as that of an insect. Young-gul scoffs at this notion, saying that a human’s death is “much more noble”. The woman then invites him to share a glass of orange juice with her. Afterwards, she confesses that she has come to the forest as part of a suicide pact. As her partner in that pact has failed to show up, she has instead poisoned Youg-gul so that he can accompany her into death.

My last encounter with director Kim Ki-Young was a screening of his 1960 masterpiece The Housemaid, which is widely considered to be one of the most important works in Korean cinema. Suffice it to say that I had a hard job of picking my jaw up off the floor afterward. In that film, Kim matter of factly, and from behind a veneer of tidy formalism, piled on ever more absurdly heightened levels of melodrama and depravity before finally delivering an out-of-left-field climax that could have easily taught Zac Snyder the real meaning of the term “sucker punch”. As you might guess from the above summary of A Woman After a Killer Butterfly’s opening five minutes, the intervening eighteen years seemed to have done little to mellow him out.

The 1970s were a depressed period for Korean cinema, but, thanks to the financial support of his wife, a successful dentist, Kim was able to continue working independently, making the films that he wanted to make with relatively little interference. And what the films he wanted to make looked like, for the most part, were genre films -- albeit genre films that were driven more by Kim’s peculiar sensibilities and obsessions than by any of the tropes one would normally expect. This, combined with his tendency toward rough surrealism, tempts me to compare Kim to Seijun Suzuki, although the ringing endorsement that would amount to on my part makes me feel that I should wait until I take in a few more of his film before (probably inevitably) making it.

As for the hapless Young-gul, he survives his poisoning, although his poisoner dies. And in perhaps an early example of Korean cinema’s long tradition of unlikely police protocols, the detective assigned to the case gives him the woman’s distinctive butterfly pendant as a souvenir. He nonetheless remains depressed and suicidal in the wake of the event and, upon returning home, decides to hang himself. He is interrupted in this by a knock on the door from a scruffy itinerant book seller, who insists that he buy a book about overcoming death through the power of will. The seller says that he has read the book himself and, as a result, cannot be killed. And so, as you would, Young-gul kills him. True to his word, the seller returns to life and continues to hector Young-gul as he decomposes. Even after Young-gul burns his body, the seller briefly returns in skeletal form before finally collapsing into dust.

Young-gul next accompanies a friend to a cave, from which they steal the two thousand year old skeleton of a Silla Dynasty era woman. His friend tells him that if Young-gul does a proper enough job of reassembling the skeleton, it might mean a job for him working as an assistant to the prominent archeologist Professor Lee (Nam Koong Won). And so Young-gul sets to the task, finding that, once assembled, the skeleton gains flesh and returns to life as a beautiful young woman. Having been put under a spell by an ancient shaman in order to avoid an unhappy marriage, the woman informs Young-gul that she must now consume a raw human liver in order to prevent herself from returning to skeletal form. Young-gul frowns upon this and confines her to his apartment. Upon returning, he brings with him a pastry-making machine that he has bought in the hope that it will help them make a little extra money. The two then share a night of passion as the machine noisily belches out pastry shells all over them.

Hold on, I’m not finished…

Unable to bring herself to eat Young-gul’s liver, the woman allows herself to once more become a skeleton, which Young-gul then dutifully delivers to Professor Lee. It turns out that Professor Lee has a daughter, Kyungmi (Kim Ja-ok), who, like all of the women in Killer Butterfly, is icily antagonistic toward Young-gul. It is eventually revealed that she was the erstwhile partner in the suicide pact with the woman from the beginning of the movie, with a matching butterfly pendant to prove it, and that she now also wants Young-gul to take her late partner’s place and accompany her into death. Meanwhile, a mysterious party is sending skulls to Professor Lee that are claimed to be ancient, yet appear to be freshly harvested, with newly severed heads starting to arrive soon thereafter. In a sudden detour into giallo territory, Young-gul sets out to find the culprit and, in the process, witnesses the desecration of a corpse by a man in a butterfly costume.

Now, as much as I abhor lengthy plot synopsis, I think it can be forgiven in this case because… well, first of all, because characterizing what’s described above as such would require an extremely charitable definition of the word “plot”. But also because the manic unpredictability of same is one of the primary factors that makes Killer Butterfly so compellingly, fascinatingly watchable. Rather than weave a story, Kim here catalogues a series of events that steadily escalate in insanity, with the only structure seemingly provided by his obsessively hammering upon themes of gynophobia and the notion of a life force and death urge locked in a constant cycle of mutual derision and belittlement. At the same time, the movie keeps a maddeningly straight face through its stately approach to color and composition, exhibiting a formalism that, I think, speaks to Kim’s time spent in Japan. And then sometimes there’s a pastry machine. The result is a film that lulls the viewer into an expectation of familiar genre elements and then plunges him down a rabbit hole tracing the labyrinthine contours of a singularly fevered imagination.

Believe it or not, there is much of A Woman After a Killer Butterfly that I have refrained from describing, including a denouement that goes every bit as far off the rails as that of The Housemaid. Fortunately, like the previously reviewed -- and just as cumbersomely titled -- Devil! Take the Train to Hell, it is one of a number of films made available in full on YouTube by the Korean Film Archive. Now, I’m not saying that you’ll like it, but I am saying you should check it out. Because, like it or not, I guaranty you’ll never have seen anything quite like it.

Devil! Take the Train to Hell (South Korea, 1977)

It turns out that YouTube’s lifting of its length restrictions has been one of the greatest boons to world popular cinema fans to come along in a good while, with the only inherent difficulty lying not in finding the gems, but in knowing what gems exist to be found. The latest mother lode comes courtesy of the Korean Film Archive, who recently uploaded a large collection of vintage Korean popular cinema to the site -- with English subtitles, no less -- for our enjoyment and edification. Given the previous unavailability of such films in our part of the world, we Westerners have a lot to learn from them. For instance, from Devil! Take the Train to Hell I learned that -- like movie audiences pretty much everywhere else in the world during the 1970s -- South Koreans had a healthy taste for funky revenge thrillers.

D4TH is one of a handful of films directed by the actor No-Shik Park, a prolific star of action films with a career spanning back to the 1950s. Here Park casts himself as Donghyuk, a blind saxophone player leading a double life as a Korean national living in Japan. Following his gigs at the smoky burlesque club where he works, Donghyuk, using his specially honed skills, determinedly feels his way along the darkened city streets, seeking to mete out revenge against the four former Japanese soldiers who, eighteen years earlier, blinded him and murdered his father. Arriving at the home of one of these men to find that someone has already done his dirty work for him, Donghyuk is reunited with Yeji (Bo-yeong Ahn), a girl from his village who also lost her father in the same incident. As Yeji has clearly assigned herself to the same mission of vengeance as Donghyuk, the two decide to pool their resources and take on the three remaining scoundrels as a team.

Having thus established itself as a film that doesn’t put too high a premium on credibility, D4TH proceeds to place our two protagonists in a series of increasingly outlandish and coincidence dependent scenarios. As Yeji and Donghyuk’s targets have all in the intervening years gone on to become powerful crime figures, breaching the walls of security around them requires some improbable, “Mission Impossible” style escapades on their part. One of these involves the sightless Donghyuk learning to both drive a car and to catch arrows in mid flight. Another involves a box containing poisonous snakes upon which Yeji seems to exert some kind of psychic control. And finally, in order to trap a victim who is an amateur photographer, we have Yeji infiltrating a model shoot dressed as a sexy cowgirl.

Throughout, D4TH distinguishes itself by saturating its oddball thriller trappings in an almost comically heightened level of melodrama. Truly, it’s a wonder that Yeji and Donghyuk ever get around to killing anybody, given all the time they spend crumbling into a collective heap of tears and self recrimination. Donghyuk is perhaps the least stoic disabled person in the history of cinema, never missing an opportunity to go on a self pitying tirade, and furthermore -- for reasons I won’t go into here -- considers himself partially responsible for what happened to Yeji’s father. Yeji, for her part, feels Donghyuk’s pain perhaps a little bit too acutely, and for some reason finds herself unable to tell him once she realizes that she’s fallen in love with him. She does, however, tell us -- in a series of voiceovers that are increasingly utilized to make us privy to the leads’ tortured internal monologues. All of this extravagant hair tearing builds up to an appropriately absurd and bathetic last minute twist that has to be seen to be truly appreciated.

Stylistically, D4TH is a bit bare bones, with the odd, attention grabbing flourish here and there. Park exhibits a shrewd use of slow motion to heighten dramatic scenes, and elsewhere strategically drops the audio out to underscore a character’s subjective isolation. A brief nightclub dance worthy of a Jess Franco film also bears mentioning. But what the film otherwise lacks in aesthetic razzle dazzle it more than makes up for in its loopy conceits. Donghyuk and Yeji clearly live in a world in which the rules of everyday logic that the rest of us have to contend with don’t apply, yet we are nonetheless asked to identify with their tragic humanity. After all, whether you’re a blind jazzman with preternatural martial arts skills or a woman who can inexplicably telepathically command snakes, you’re still not immune to the pain of loss, the depredations of war, or the ravages of personal guilt. As the film’s title seems to suggest, that’s a train ride we’ve all got our tickets punched for.