The Housemaid: Cheating on Your Wife Means Gambling With Your Life

Checking references for a potential domestic hire? If the candidate's name is Myong-ja (Lee Eun-shim), be sure to talk with her former boyfriend as well as her recent employers. This girl's got serious jealousy issues! In Kim Ki-young's kooky melodrama The Housemaid, all hell breaks loose when this saucy servant starts cooking and cleaning... then screwing the master-of-the-house -- a music teacher named Dong Sik (Kim Jin-kyu) who leads a women's choir at the local factory. What's the best way to deal with her irrational behavior? Try to kill her off with the same rat poison she used to kill your bratty son (Ahn Sung-kee) and you'll end up like Dong's wife (Ju Jeung-nyeo ): a slave to her sewing machine and Myong-ja! Try to defuse her when she explodes and you'll end up like Miss Cho (Eom Aeng-ran): at the wrong end of a very long knife! Whatever you do, don't continue to sleep with her!!! In this movie's crazed reality, Dong Sik's last-ditch attempt to get away leads to his loony lover being latched on to his ankle and bumping her head against every stair along his failed escape. As black-and-white middle-class tragedies go, this one is campy, corny and not too credible.

Ban Gyeumryeon: Hello, My Concubines

Since Japanese invaders destroyed Korea's films from the early 20th century, a director like Kim Ki-young (who worked regularly through the eighties), can be deigned an Old Master simply because his early work dates to the second beginning. If his torrid Ban Gyeumryeon is any indicator, that's like elevating Roger Corman to the status of D.W. Griffith or Orson Welles. (Not such a terrible idea, really, is it?) Created in 1975 then banned until 1981, the aforementioned, convoluted costume drama about a salt merchant and his Darwinian harem plays like Asia's answer to Hammer Films. Pretty women scheme and scream; men cackle crazily or feel up the ladies through fancy silks; cameras scan latticework or zoom in meaningfully to compensate for bad acting; footage of a slow-moving river is inserted (and occassionally tinted) as if a repeated symbol could gain meaning by not having any real meaning at all. But this isn't some museum piece of melodrama or an unintentional symbolist drama. It's much more fun than that. In Kim's universe, cats kill babies and faithful wives love their husbands even after death and decapitation. In a world where recycling has become a necessity, let's take the time to give trash the respect it deserves.