I Wish I Had A Wife (2001) @ 나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다

At a glance:

Park Heung-sik's I Wish I Had A Wife 나도 아내가 있었으면 좋겠다 is the worst Korean movie experience a man can get. Forget the wife, you’d sooner wish you had a life – instead of havin to spend time and money watchin this. While its advantages are few and far between, the problems abound shamelessly. Revolvin around a bank teller with serious personality issues, our man goes on a subdued panic attack after he realises the undeniable emptiness in his borin white-collar workin life gives him nobody to call when he is stuck on a subway train for an hour. Amazin then – he concludes that he needs a wife. Our hero-with-a-calculator Bong-soo (Sul Kyoung-gu) goes on a 100-minute meanderin moan about his solitude. His ponderings are so secular, self-indulgent and ridiculous that it becomes shockin to see somethin so uninterestin go up on screen for a feature-length movie. True to Korean cinema clichés (read: everythin is more important than it really is), there are hardly any movie messages to note when Mr. Need-A-Wife hunts his bride far and wide, illogically ignorin the cute school teacher who fancies him. This mouse of a woman, Won-Ju (Jeon Do-yeon), is so terribly cute, one is in danger of bleedin pumpkin pies from one’s ears whenever she graces the screen.

Bad news on the doorstep:
Peppered with Bong-soo’s random magic tricks (he can poke an invisible hole through a 1000-won note!) and other miscellaneous fillers like CCTV footage of what bored people do at the ATM booth, I Wish I Had A Wife has but one savin grace as defence - the awkward courtship between the lead pair is quirky enough to be screen-worthy at times because it is more realistic than the picture-perfect Hollywood plot devices we are used to. Is this enough for you to watch it?

Perennial wonderment:

One suspects that this is actually an ill-advised direct and unaltered adaptation from some writer’s own experience. This movie is too quiet without being poignant, too random without bein artsy, and perhaps too ‘real’ to make a movie out of. Even if you pardon the soppy music score, askin an audience to sit through a low-key drama about one man’s wife-hunt with so little reward is truly selfish on the filmmakers’ part.

Amacam joker, berapa bintang lu mau kasi?

It refused to be a ‘good’ bad movie when it could – and worse, to end when it should. You couldn’t leave the cinema seat faster. ★1/2

I Saw The Devil (2010) @ 악마를 보았다

"Honestly guys, I have never met Cho Seung-hui."

At a glance:

Naked dead body. Yummy.

"We wanted make it look cruel rather than grotesque," reads the notes from special make-up artist Kwak Tae-yung - but I Saw The Devil 악마를 보았다 is so unrelentingly brutal that there will be little separatin the two by the time you're through all 144 minutes of its R21-rated (Singapore) violence porno. Alright, that's an exaggeration. What is plain to see however, is that director Kim Jee Woon "wanted to watch the primitive energy that arises out of the clash of mad rage like an active volcano and icy-cold lunacy", which is why this movie doesn't even attempt to explain it characters or their motivations. It's a cold, cold thriller about how the wrong and the wronged go at one another in such relentless fashion that you simply cannot look away from the screen - and despite arrivin at these shores more than a full year after its South Korean release, I Saw The Devil, now apparently available in its uncensored entirety, is definitely hot stuff, and one for the filmmakin canon.

Bad news on the doorstep:

"I just want to go home and play with my iPhone."

Some people want more character motivation explained, I guess. Also, the bit involvin extra friends don't seem to gel with the rest of the story.

Perennial wonderment:

How hard is it to dispose of a dead body?

Reminds me of:

We have Old Boy Choi Min-sik to thank for his menacin screen presence, despite not havin appeared in anything for five years. He plays a seemingly pathological psychopath who kills young women for pleasure and on a freezin, snowy night, his latest victim just so happens to be the beautiful daughter of a retired police chief and pregnant fiancee of elite special agent Soo-hyun, played by international Korean icon Lee Byung-hun (Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies). Lee's performance here is nothin short of extraordinary. It's a story that goes beyond cat-and-mouse to cover even catch-and-release. Perhaps the beauty in this peculiar film is that it is so fatalistically resigned from the outset and yet due to its stylish direction we are so drawn to follow the warring pair to the bitter end.

"Have you ever tried amputee sex?"

Amacam joker, berapa bintang lu mau kasi?
I Saw The Devil is an aptly named film and I can definitely admire to the director's aspirations that "through the two characters who mercilessly attack each other for revenge, [I] hope the audience will question why some people lead normal lives while others live like the devil - also, wonder where did everything start to go wrong or where are we headed". Like Choi Min-sik's cult classic Old Boy (2003), it's a movie that forces us to examine the monsters we may not know we're keepin. ★★ 1/2
Bonus material:

Joe Pesci wouldda been proud.

Hidden Floor (2006) @ 네번째 층

At a glance:
Written by Yoo Il-han, the same man behind accompaniments Roommates, 29 February and Dark Forest - all which form an unrelated tetralogy of horror tales that did release in Malaysia back in 2007. It's evident from all four movies that Yoo does have a penchant for confined eeriness but the film adaptation for this one is technically insufficient to convey and extend that talent. Sufferin from the lack of impact is this story of a single mum and her daughter, both whom find the experience of stayin in a new apartment frightenin when a missin floor in the buildin seems to be the answer behind a spate of mysterious deaths.
Bad news on the doorstep:
Claustrophobic direction fails to double up with anythin original in its execution. Very little effort is made to expand beyond the traditional long-haired, bare-footed woman ghost and drippin faucets, not to mention the age-old 'oh-no-it's-the-same-floor-wherever-I-go' deja vu. Jerky body movements a la Ju-On are sparingly used, interwoven mostly between a semi-useful character development of its central characters - the mother, played by Kim Seo-hyeong (pic) and the daughter, played by Kim Yoo-jeong. Although the child actor offered more than a competent performance, so cliche is the relationship between the two (think the original Japanese Dark Water and Maria Bello's Welsh legend story The Dark) that their fate becomes suggestively pointless.
Perennial wonderment:
Succeeds in at least one department like Hollywood horror staples Saw and Psycho did - how a lot of action goes on in confined spaces. This limitation of parameters has become a proven formula in generatin fear and terror because people put in a suffocatin environment tend to have a greater sense of imagination, most of it negative.
Reminds me of:
Fuckin ghosts man, what else.
Amacam joker, berapa bintang lu mau kasi?K-horror is fuckin tedious, what can I say. While J-horrors prefer to centre on haunted objects or buildings, Korean ones tend to add an extra dimension by placin motive as an equally important plot device as well. However, in the same way a new object must be found to put a ghost into, motives need to diversify as well. Two stars is fair.