Tidal Wave: Cheap Laughs Then a Bucket of Cold Water

For much of writer-director-but-hardly-auteur Yun Je-gyun's Tidal Wave, I wondered... Have I been misinformed? Is this a disaster pic or a spoof? It certainly feels like a spoof. No complaints for my part. To the contrary, I'll gladly laugh and snort in derision on cue. The comic antics of the losers who live, love, and loaf at the beach resort of Haeundae serve two purposes too. 1. They make you chuckle. 2. They make you oh-so-eager for that big wave that's going to wipe all that goofy ineptitude away. And yet when the tsunami strikes -- albeit a little late in the game for my taste -- I inexplicably found myself swept up in the various survivor stories. How the hell did that happen? Maybe, just maybe, that guilt-ridden drunk Man-sik (Sol Kyung-gu), that shrewish bitch Yu-jin (Eom Jeong-hwa), and even that psychotic girlfriend Yeon-heui (Ha Ji-won) deserve to live. Oh, hell no. I take that back. Rise, ocean, rise! Non sequitir: I don't usually watch the DVD extras but this time, I decided to check out the gag reel and boy was it NOT funny. There are a few very disturbing excerpts of a child actor getting smacked and later, that same kid not wanting to simulate drowning no matter what his pay scale. Easily the scariest part of the movie.

Temptation of Eve: A Good Wife: And Now a Word on Hot-bodied Backstabbers

I hereby postulate that actors who are stunningly beautiful (Sophia Loren, Nastassja Kinski, Marlon Brando, etc.) don't need to act. Instead, they can stare disinterestedly into the distance for all I care. I'll do the hard work and invest their faces with deeper meaning. Actors who are simply really good looking however better have some acting chops to go with those chiseled features. Otherwise, like in Kwak Jeong-deok's Temptation of Eve: A Good Wife, you grow to resent them a little as the film goes on. Neither Kim Tae-hyeon nor Jin Seo-yeon is talentless but looking this good in an erotic thriller this boilerplate, they need to be a bit more nuanced in their performances to win our affections. Otherwise, the mind begins to wander and all those tawdry sex scenes that should be heightening the suspense feel as though they're shortchanging us because they never cross over into porn. We don't care if he's cycling out of control with lust. We don't care if she's out to poison her husband (Ahn Nae-sang) to get the insurance money. And if we don't care who might be doublecrossing who, then we haven't got much of a movie. With really just three characters of note (and even fewer locations), Temptation of Eve feels like a play that's been filmed for television. But not PBS. More like Ovation.

Dark Forest of Death: Here's to the Bucolic Zombie

Horror fans jabber away about fast zombies versus slow zombies but how about city zombies versus country ones? Is there any difference between the pale-faced corpses who reanimate in urban environs and those who resurrect in the woods? Kim Jeong-min's low-budget Blair-Witch-meets-Dawn-of-the-Dead flick doesn't answer that question directly but the casualties in his Death Forest of Death are definitely victims of an evil woodland spirit, not a man-made disease run amok. It's man versus vengeful nature here, not man versus sinister science. And these zombies are sometimes fast, sometimes slow and always out to get you. Whether you join their ranks or not isn't dependent on whether you decapitate them before they make you bleed either. The only thing that can save your life is stopping your own blood from hitting that forest floor. Since no one here ever learns this basic rule of survival, their successive deaths are all unavoidable. Ignorance is death, as they used to say. Until someone sees the forest floor drink a whole bucket of blood and not just slurp up a few drops, visitors to this national park are going to continue to die one by one. Cleanliness is next to godliness after all.

Killing Machine: She Only Seems Crazy, Indie Fans

Killing Machine is one of those movies that never quite lives up to the insanity of its plot synopsis. The story is invitingly nuts: A high school nymph (Lee So-yun) earns extracurricular money by hooking with the faculty then falls into a brief relationship with one maniacal teacher (Kim Dae-tong) who rapes her, impregnates her, shoots her, mutilates her, hires a super-seamstress to stitch her back together, then turns her into a robot assassin. Trimmed of the excess footage showing the victim/vigilante standing/staring or running through poorly lit interiors, director Nam Gee-wong's Killing Machine would've probably run a zanily enjoyable half-hour. As is, this artsy exercise in cyberpunk surrealism runs closer to an hour. That means you often have to wait through stretches of filler to get to the weird imagery like a post-op fembot's gunblasted breast leaking green goo and gnarly wires or a Metropolis-inspired rebirth during which thick electric cords pump new life into the recently dismembered girl. It's no B-movie beauty a la Hera Purple or Terror Taxi but Killing Machine is at least an attempt to think outside the box. Good things come in small packages but good things in oversized packages tend to feel disappointingly small.

Voices: A Chorus of Loved Ones Are Out to Kill You

If everyone close to you wanted you to die -- and by everyone, I mean your mom, your dad, your little sister, your boyfriend, your best friend, your homeroom teacher, and your fencing coach -- would life be worth living? If the answer is "yes" then factor in this: Would life still be worth living if it meant killing each and every one of your loved ones to survive. Because these are the questions haunting unfortunate schoolgirl Ga-in (Yun Jin-seo) in director Oh Ki-hwan's frightful fright flick Voices. For me, those two existential questions begged a third, more professional one. Namely, if you were offered the lead part in a not-so-hot movie in which you were going to be stalked at knife point by every member of your family without a logical motive and furthermore had to respond "Yes" to the question "Feel better," every time you murdered someone in self-defense, would you take the part for the exposure? One saying has it, there are no small parts, just small actors. I would add that there are no small movies, just movies in which you'd be better off taking a smaller role. As the mysterious stranger, Park Ki-woong gets to look stylishly dangerous without having to act. That's an ideal scenario in a pic like this.

Murder, Take One: There's No Reason to Take a Second Shot

My friend Graham suggested early on that I stop watching Murder, Take One and ask the readers to tell me the ending. It was that boring. But I stuck with it, and writer-director Jang Jin's police procedural did finally pick up with the late entrance of a motherly exorcist (Lee Yong-lee) and her child sidekick. Prior to that, I was basically wondering how tall is that dashing detective (Cha Seung-won) -- He's 6'2" according to Wiki -- and why has he agreed to have his interrogation of the main suspect (Shin Ha-kyun) videotaped for prime time? Can the resultant program possibly be getting good ratings? Who are the sponsors? They weren't questions I felt deeply. Just things to think about while I clipped my toenails or nibbled on a frosted strawberry pop tart. But ghosts can make a movie more interesting. What had been a not particularly suspenseful murder mystery wrapped in a bland TV news special now became a ticklishly spooky character portrait about a cute cop who may have some connection to the other side. When the cocky television producer got possessed by the victim's spirit, I had to confess: This wasn't the worst Korean movie I'd ever seen. Up until then, it had been in the running.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird: Let's Assume You Can Drawl in Korean

The Ramen Western, like its forebear the Spaghetti Western, fetishizes the genre. All the period details -- the opium pipes, the sweeping leather coats, the aviator goggles, even the rotten teeth -- don't ground the action in reality. They tickle us with their particularity. That's especially true in Kim Ji-woon's vintage piece of filmmaking The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Here actors Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, and Jung Woo-sung seem to be playing cowboys in a tribute to a Sergio Leone homage more than performing in a movie indebted to John Ford or Sam Peckinpah. Consider this flick a hall of tarnished, sometimes cracked mirrors reflecting dusty cowboy hats, galloping horses and a big Montana sky. You'll be as pleased when you get the expected (like the climactic battle involving cannons, the Japanese militia, and scores of rebels on a desert landscape) as the unexpected (Song absurdly running around with a diving helmet straight out of Jules Verne). There's plenty of blood -- some of it splattering on the camera lens -- and more than a little sadism (one stabbing scene leading to the slicing off of a finger is particularly gruesome). Neither ever feels gratuitous. Much of it's pretty fun.