A Bizarre Love Triangle: The Virtues of Being Weird

Lee Mu-yeong's A Bizarre Love Triangle may be an ineffectual dud in some ways but it's also such an oddity, with more-than-a-few WTF moments sprinkled throughout its cockamamie story, that you can't just dismiss it outright as something terrible. Repeatedly, in this screwball comedy about a deadpan standup comic (Choi Kwang-il), a female Tae Kwon Do instructor (Kong Hyo-jin) and the bimbo (Jo Eun-ji) they both inexplicably love, you're likely to do a double-take at your television and hit rewind to confirm that what you saw really did happen. Nonsensical narrative twists and out-of-left-field visual details occur regularly as if to justify the word "bizarre" in the title. Here are nine details of note. I'll let you provide the tenth yourself.

1. The movie is a flashback to the present from a space colony on the moon. (No scifi comes into play outside that.)
2. A blind masseuse pressures her young lover to donate her eyes, over drinks.
3. The femme fatale performs a monologue from Othello while wearing a hooker's pink fright wig. (She doesn't get the part!)
4. A strange Cirque-du-soleil quartet does a Solid Gold number following one comedy act. (Or maybe it's a Vegas version of Cats.)
5. A guy in the background at a talk show attaches a toilet plunger to his head.
6. An electronic, hot pink dildo suddenly appears.
7. A fairly graphic blowjob is enacted after the character you didn't expect to get pregnant has her baby.
8. One sex scene is shown entirely as shadow puppetry.
9. The film concludes with a gay wedding involving two characters you know nothing about.

This doesn't even count the weird leaps of logic, like when the martial arts instructor noisily robs her sleeping blind lover or when the stand-up comic confesses he's a fraud as if that kind of honesty could win over a studio audience. And then there's the dead baby...

Yoga Hakwon: Horror Stretches in an Expected Direction

I've always found it infuriating when people carp, "I love yoga except for the spiritual part. I wish they'd get rid of that chanting." But maybe I just didn't understand. Maybe it wasn't the God stuff that was bothering people. Maybe it was yoga's Satanic undercurrents. Yoga Hakwon has now set me straight. A horror movie about a secret yoga practice that promises one lucky student per class the gift of "ultimate beauty," the movie cannily targets the superficial people who take yoga for vanity's sake, not for their soul's salvation. You want a soulless version of yoga? You got it, bitch!

To be the prettiest graduate in this particular week-long intensive, however, is going to take serious work. The five women enrolled at Mi-hee's seclusive, exclusive studio -- as well as their enimgatic, dictatorial instructor Na-ni (Cha Su-yeon) -- are all really pretty and really limber. Plus they're going to be asked to make some major sacrifices right off, like relinquishing their cell phones, refraining from snack foods, and not looking in the mirror every other second for seven days. They must also resist the impulse to take a hot shower within an hour after their last class. Sound easy? Well, it's not. We're talking impulse control, habit breaking, and downward facing dog.

Inevitably, everyone will succumb to temptation in one form or another. Binging will earn the twitchy one (Jo Eun-ji) boils all over her body; a poorly timed shower will drive the arrogant one (Kim Hye-na) to deepthroat a snake. The youngest two (Hwang Seung-eon and Park Han-byeol) are dragged offscreen, presumably to Hell, because they can't stay away from their own reflections. Ah, youth! As for Hyo-jeong (Kim Yoo-jin), the cell-phone user who's just lost her job as a home shopping spokeswoman for lingerie, she's let off easy. She actually graduates and meets the institute's ageless beauty Mi-hee (Lee Hye-sang) -- a former actress who's career ended with the talkies but who still looks absolutely fantastic. Yoga is the key to eternal youth, you know...if you combine it with Devil worship.

Director Yun Jae-yeon's Yoga Hakwon has a pretty cool ending. After struggling to escape the institute and reunite with her adorable if underpaid boyfriend (Choi Daniel) who happens to be making a documentary about Mi-hee's longtime director Kang Hee-jong (Jeong In-gi), Hyo-jeong finds herself released from the institute and walking through a subway station where she encounters rival students that she's were dead. Is she crazy? Is she possessed? Is she stuck in an alternate world that's basically hell? Only a sequel could tell us for sure.

A.F.R.I.K.A.: It Takes Two Guns to Make Four Best Friends

One pretty young thing (Kim Min-sun) has a stalled acting career. Another (Lee Yu-won) has no career to speak of. Bored, cute, and without direction, the two find a couple of guns while on a weekend getaway at the beach then end up car-hijackers/robbers on the run after stealing a vehicle from two guys who've tried to rape them. Soon thereafter, they're joined by a low-rent hooker (Jo Eun-ji) and a high-class ex-con (Lee Young-jin) equally dissatisfied with life and just as eager to run around looking sexy with firearms. More power to them! How these four become a tight-knit girl gang is a direct result of some feminine-bonding activities: pedicures, dancing, cooking, crying, baths with lesbian overtones, group hugs, screaming matches, and even breast enlargement exercises...all made more intense because they're being chased by a bumbling cop (Sung Ji-ru) and his two delinquent sidekicks who lost the guns in a poker game. Shin Seung-soo's A.F.R.I.K.A. is a ballsy chick flick, a reckless romp with gratuitous male nudity. It's completely implausible: No one gets shot despite the endless bang-bang; no one gets caught despite endless video footage of the crimes. Don't hate me for liking it.