The Outlaw: Quitting the Force to Be More Forceful

Officer Oh (Kam Woo-seong) doesn't play by the rules. Oh, no. He's a renegade cop who believes you gotta step outside the law to serve the law. Needless to say, that approach -- while lowering crime rates -- has landed him in trouble with Internal Affairs infinite times. But lately he's gone from outside the law to off the rails. When his long missing wife (Kim Min-joo) and the daughter (Hyeon Na-gyeong) he never knew are pointlessly stabbed to death in a restaurant bathroom, he turns in his badge and picks up a torture porn mask then goes for the kill on two murdering party animals (Peter Ronald Holman, Tak Tu-in) and the negligent members of a justice departments that let those jerks off Scot free.

Catering to an audience that craves shock and gore, writer-director Kim Cheol-han packs a lot of on-screen violence in The Outlaw. You see multiple throats slit, a finger shot off, and men mercilessly beaten with chains. Whether it's good guys or bad guys inflicting the violence varies. Gannibalism? Bad guy. Rape? Bad guy. Impromptu laryngectomy? Good guy, actually. Is Kim attempting to show that too many years in Homicide will lead a cop to adopt the very methodology of those he's out to imprison? Perhaps. But he's also a director who simply likes to show brutality. Why else show Oh having a group hug with his family's bloody corpses?

Fun fact: While researching The Outlaw on asianwiki.com (which is devoted to Asian movies and TV), I discovered that the website sometimes includes the actor's blood type alongside his height, weight and age. Why this is relevant or important, I don't know but if you were curious, Kam Woo-seong is Type O. I also googled up Korean blood type personalities and learned that Type O carriers tend to be "outgoing" and "optimistic" so maybe he was miscast in this role as an anti-social misanthrope. Some actors sure love to play against type!

Marraige Is a Crazy Thing: She Pushes Love to Extremes John Donne Never Considered

Yeon-hee (Eom Jeong-hwa) shows the depth of her love for Jun-young (Kam Woo-seong) in a weird way: She stages a whole faux relationship with him from courtship to marriage, then from honeymoon to separation -- even as she marries someone else in reality. All these pretend dates and pseudo-life-stages are intended to get her dimpled, English poetry professor to realize that he's the one that she truly adores. But when you think about it, her elaborate playacting is a major turnoff. While it's easy to peg Jun-young as a selfish commitment-phobe who uses Yeon-hee for sex and money, it's just as easy to call Yeon-hee a callous two-timer who never makes herself truly vulnerable and whose stab at martyrdom is a glib one. The tortured relationship that develops between these two is exactly what each deserves. He's a jerk who doesn't deserve a pretty, self-sacrificing wife. She's a greedy manipulator who shouldn't be getting unconditional affection from her well-educated gigolo. The final moment of Yu Ha's Marriage Is a Crazy Thing suggests a reconciliation but the white picket fence ahead for these two is likely to rot and fall apart.

The King and The Clown: A Daisy Chain of Tops and Bottoms

Indigent circus performers strike it rich. Now that's a cause for celebration, right? Sure, it is. But for some lucky clowns, it's also a cause for consternation. You see, when this particular tightrope walker (Kam Woo-seong) and his cross-dressing sidekick (Lee Jun-gi) find favor with a somewhat crazy, petulantly sadistic emperor (Jeong Jin-yeong), they also find themselves drawn into more than one troubled love triangle and some life-threatening political intrigue. But can the rope-walking acrobat help caring so deeply about his cross-dressing cohort? And can the cross-dresser help inspiring lusty thoughts in that kooky king? And, for that matter, can the royal courtesan (Kang Seong-yeon) help being jealous of that role-playing pretty boy who's also good with puppets and has a unique calligraphic style? No. No. No. A magnificently told tale based on a true story from the 16th century Chosun dynasty, The King and the Clown is a topnotch, romantic costume drama that knows when to be comic even if it's headed for tragedy. The performances are uniformly excellent, right down to the minor characters. Needless to say, I'll be checking out other collaborations of director Lee Jun-ik and writer Choi Seok-hwan.

Spider Forest: A Deadly Case of Amnesia

Memory can be tricky but at least most people have the luxury of knowing their lives will unfold in a linear fashion. Not so, Kang Min (Kam Woo-seong). This unlucky victim of a hit-and-run accident is caught in an infernal time loop that has him regaining consciousness in the most traumatic parts of his past. Struggling to get a grip on reality, he's forced to relive the death of his wife (Suh Jung), the loss of his job as a TV producer, a deeply felt betrayal by his newscaster-girlfriend (Kang Kyeong-heon), and his all-but-forgotten childhood which he's slowly piecing together with some help from a strangely familiar photoshop owner (Suh Jung again). That Kang's doing all this while suffering from a spider-bite and a serious head injury only compounds his hallucinogenic disorientation. Beautifully shot and intoxicatingly cryptic, Song Il-gon's Spider Forest is a humdinger of a puzzler to be sure. You may be able to predict certain plot twists but Song executes them so exquisitely and with such nuance that even the expected feels fresh. A noir fable with a couple of steamy sexy scenes, Spider Forest is a movie I've got lost in more than once. No doubt, I'll go there again.

R-Point: The Bermuda Triangle, Now in Vietnam

A Korean platoon is sent to the mysterious R-point in Vietnam to find out what's happened to some missing comrades. What they discover is a castle hosting the ghost of Agatha Christie who's camped out on this island just south of Saigon to fashion a wartime version of her bestselling novel Ten Little Indians (a.k.a. And Then There Were None). There's mist. There's blood. Sergeants and Corporals scream because the radio picks up voices from the dead. An American-made tape recorder playing The Ventures and the anguished cries of other men doesn't do much to calm anyone's fears. Is director-writer Kong Su-chang railing against the futility of war? (We're just killing ourselves!) Is there a message here about how we're haunted by past mistakes whether that's stealing a camera or getting a venereal disease? (Don't shoplift or sleep around!) Who exactly is that woman in white? (Wilkie Collins' muse!) Actor Kam Woo-seong, of the equally enigmatic Spider Forest, brings star quality to the shouting and the shooting. Otherwise, once you've figured out that all but one are destined to die, this one loses steam. I guess you could say that I've hereby spoiled it for you. Sorry.