Snowpiercer: Bong Joon-ho Does Scifi a la Park Chan-wook

St. Teresa's The Interior Castle. Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are many examples of spiritual journeys that take their protagonists through a series of bizarre rooms before delivering them to an inner chamber housing a great if hidden truth. For Bong Joon-ho, the rooms in Snowpiercer may be train cars but the quest remains the same: The hero -- or in this case, the cannibalistic antihero (Chris Evans) -- must navigate a succession of rooms, each with its unique challenges, each with its own queer millieu, before arriving at the font of wisdom. The engine room, as it were. Along the way, he'll pass through a well-guarded water room with a lady tyrant clownishly played by a buck-toothed Tilda Swinton, a Willy Wonka-esque school room overseen by a blindingly sunny, pregnant fascist (Alison Pill), a kitchen where cockroaches are turned into gelatinous bricks of protein, a greenhouse, a steam room, a nightclub, and so on. The final chamber -- the engine room -- is ironically the domain of a child-kidnapping God-like tyrant (Ed Harris). Shades of The Truman Show?

What's unusual is that once Ed Harris' character unveils the TRUTH, the epiphany occurs not for Curtis but for Yona (Ko Ah-sung), a seer who hasn't heard it and who, as apprentice to the train's master locksmith Min-Soo (Song Kang-ho), has spent much of the time in a drug-addled haze. Are we hallucinating this scifi pic's parade of celebs along with her, for there's also John Hurt as a steampunk Yoda, Jamie Bell as a second banana in the people's army and a sleepy-eyed Octavia Spencer as a mom out to get her kid back. You might also cite Park Chan-wook as a co-star. While he doesn't appear on screen, his imprint is apparent as producer: Snowpiercer is packed with the video-game violence that has caused some critics to label Park as a purveyor of gore porn. I've never felt that way but I do feel the recurring blood-splattering here proved a bit much. Bong usually finds his shocks in psychology.

Doomsday Book: Three Short Films Herald End of the World as We Know It

The apocalypse elicits mixed feelings in me. The primacy of survival appeals to my minimalist bent. The mass destruction of life makes my heart break. Secretly, between you and me, I think that technological advancements don't always advance society but that doesn't mean that I want to see planet Earth turned into a cinder of its former self to make a technophobic point. The three doomsday scenarios played out in Doomsday Book tap into some of my fears and some of my frustrations about the end of the world scenarios, although only one does it in a way that's truly artful. That's not the first entry, Yim Pil-sung's In a Brave New World, a vegan parable that posits that one bad apple is going to transmogrify mankind into rageaholic zombies, after the rotten fruit is eaten by a cow that's eaten by another cow. The winner isn't the third short either, Yim's Happy Birthday. This woeful tale of world's end finds a little girl (Jin Ji-hee) mistakenly making an e-purchase for a meteor that resembles a giant 8-ball. You can scratch that one off your must-see list too.

The standout, for me, is -- Kim Jee-woon's The Heavenly Creature. This mesmerizing short concerns a service robot (voiced by Park Hae-il) at a Buddhist temple who may or not be the latest re-incarnation of Buddha himself. Both suspenseful and philosophical, The Heavenly Creature is chockful of clever social commentary about consciousness, loneliness, self-actualization, pets, corporate hierarchies, religion, perception, apartment dwelling, etc. It's strong enough to stand alone, even if it's running time is under an hour. The end is near. Who has time for a long movie?

Footnote for completists: Ryu Seung-beom headlines In a Brave New World as the Adam of the new zombie race while director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) also makes a brief appearance (in front of the camera for a change).

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...

Invasion of Alien Bikini: Female Aliens Ought to Be Treated Better

A hot female extraterrestrial comes to Earth in search of sperm. Sound like a porno flick? Well, don't you have a dirty mind! Remember the horror flick Species? That hardly qualifies as smut but that was basically the idea. And it's the same one here with Invasion of Alien Bikini, a weird hybrid flick that's got comedy, scifi, martial arts, horror, and domestic drama as part of its movie makeup without a naked breast in site. Which doesn't mean that sex doesn't figure into the picture. It does. The alien has taken human form (Ha Eun-jung) and spends the majority of her time parading around in a black bra and panties. But her targeted sperm donor -- a volunteer community activist (Hong Young-geun) who has unwittingly rescued her from earthlings wiser to her ways -- has taken a vow of celibacy so while he too spends much time in his underwear, her attempts to stimulate him via a feather duster, some rope and an off-screen (and somewhat bloody) blowjob are all for naught. Her biological clock clicks way too loudly for his taste.

Because of that, her attempts at pre-martial sex annoy him. He's got his moral code and a fairly damaged childhood to keep him on the straight and narrow. And when she resorts to violence as a way to get him to comply, he comes right back at her... which is the problem with Invasion of Alien Bikini. Although we know she's an alien -- we have been told as much and even seen her spine pop out and try to strangle him -- she still registers as a woman so when her designated donor turns against her and starts punching her repeatedly in the face, you can't help but see it as violence against women. Try as a I might to rationalize that scene, I couldn't shake the inherent misogyny of it, which could've been solved quite easily if we'd seen the whites of her eyes turn fluorescent green or her teeth turn metallic or her hair fall off to reveal a bald head tattooed with advanced math problems.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Invasion of Alien Bikini is a bad movie. To the contrary, it's a remarkable low-budget indie that does an immense amount with very little and has super-fun performances from its two leads. But this particular misstep knocks what could've been a Grade A B-movie into the bargain bin of basement curiosities. Maybe writer-director Oh Young-doo will right the film's wrongs with his next flick. I'd watch it!

Yesterday: Tomorrow Is Looking Doubly Depressing Today

The year is 2020 and two kindred spirits (Kim Seung-woo and Kim Yunjin) raised during the 1980s are having a rough time of it. Consider the headaches, the memory lapses, and their inability to have a sparkling conversation. A desperate, combined search for their father and a serial killer (Choi Min-Su) isn't about to make their lives easier. And despite all the years that have passed for them (and for us), tomorrow looks suspiciously like yesterday. Cops still fire machine guns, fat girls still sing in discos, and everyone still loves their cellphones -- which now come with constant advertising! In this all-too-familiar future, the most screenworthy character is secondary, a tough lady cop named May (Kim Seon-a) who likes to shoot firearms in a short sporty haircut and a tight-fitting leather tanktop. Maybe in some alternate universe, audiences will get to learn her storyline too and movies -- like video games -- will come with multiple plots we can follow and not just the one chosen by director-writer Jeon Yun-su. For today, we were stuck with Yesterday, his middling scifi flick about three siblings drowning in a messed up gene pool. For something more buoyant, check out Jeon's delightful comedy Le Grand Chef.

2009 Lost Memories: The Japanese Steal the Future

Of all the crimes against humanity, there are few worse than going back in time and changing history simply because you're ashamed you lost a war (unless that war is against robots). In the scifi action flick 2009 Lost Memories Japan, Korea's eternal nemesis, does nothing short of win WWII, nuke Berlin, and least forgivable of all, turn Korea into a Japanese colony—which at least isn't split into North and South halves because of internal conflicts. Masayuki Sakamoto (Jang Dong-kun) is going to change all that. A Korean member of the Japanese police, he stumbles upon a Korean patriotic faction that knows the secret of time travel and wants to return history on its proper track. That Japan will still emerge as a world power with Korea hardly its main commpetitor is a secondary concern. Sakamoto never thinks there might be away to exact revenge on Japan and really put them in the hot seat. He's happy enough to execute justice (and maybe his traitorous best friend, too while he's at it). Gun fire galore, a few exploding rockets, and some celebrational fireworks all add up to a body count that argues that you're better prepared in a nicely cut suit and a leather jacket than you are encased in armor because that just slows you down.