The East is Red

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In the history of Hong Kong cinema, 1986 just may go down as the finest year ever, with three landmark films – the triad thriller A Better Tomorrow, the feminist period action extravaganza Peking Opera Blues, and the wildly kinetic A Chinese Ghost Story – released that year. Even more amazing is that all three of those films had the same producer: Tsui Hark. Tsui officially directed only one – Peking Opera Blues – but his imprimatur is certainly all over the other two; even though A Better Tomorrow was director John Woo’s breakout hit, and A Chinese Ghost Story was credited to frequent Tsui collaborator Ching Siu-tung, there’s no question that Tsui was heavily involved with the direction of both, especially Ghost Story, which became a major worldwide hit for Tsui and for Hong Kong cinema. Tsui went on to produce two sequels to A Chinese Ghost Story, and in 1997 he even produced an animated version of the tale.

Like many other Hong Kong fantasy films, A Chinese Ghost Story was taken from a book called Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, a 17th-century collection of fairy tales about haunted inns and animals that become people. Many of the stories center on a young scholar who stumbles on supernatural happenings and becomes embroiled in a forbidden love affair, and Tsui kept these elements for his 1986 adaptation, adding on more horror scenes and a plot involving the young scholar’s attempts to save his ghostly love from marriage to “Lord Black”, the king of Hell. As the young government official and the tragic ghost, Tsui and Ching cast two of the most astonishingly beautiful actors in Asian cinema: The late Leslie Cheung, and Taiwanese actress Joey Wang. A moment when Wang hides Cheung underwater and lavishes a long, slow-motion kiss on him as bubbles and flower petals float past is one of the great romantic moments of all Asian cinema.

Now, in 2011, as Chinese and Hong Kong filmmakers have followed their American counterparts and begun to mine their cinematic past for remake gold, A Chinese Ghost Story has finally been reincarnated¸ although without the involvement of Tsui Hark. This time it’s director Wilson Yip at the helm, fresh off his success with the martial arts dramas Ip-man and Ip-man 2, directing unknowns Yu Shao-qun and Liu Yi-fei in the Leslie Cheung and Joey Wang roles; however, this version also throws in not one but two Taoist demon hunters, including Yan – played by popular Hong Kong leading man Louis Koo – who is also in love with the ghost girl.

This new version – which we’ll hereafter refer to as ACGS2011 – can’t help but pale by comparison to the neo-classic original, but it bears just enough resemblance to the original that fans of ACGS1986 will have a hard time letting it stand or fall on its own. It begins promisingly, with an extended flashback showing how the young Yan fell in love with the supernatural Siu Sin (who is referred to as a demon here); they finally part when he realizes that a demon-hunter and a demon can’t stay together.

Years later, a young government official, Ning, arrives to assist an isolated town suffering from a severe drought. Ning journeys with a gang of convict laborers to a mountainside temple, where he finds a well that could provide the town with water. Unfortunately, he also finds a pack of beautiful and seductive demons who murder the convicts and attack him. He barely escapes, thanks to the assistance of Siu Sin, and soon they begin to fall in love. Siu Sin reveals that she is being held captive by a thousand-year-old tree demon who is forcing lesser demons to kill for her. Things get even more complicated when Yan arrives, intent on finally killing the tree demon once and for all, and soon the other Taoist master also shows up.

If all that sounds confused and overly complicated…well, it is. Plotting is hardly the strength of either version of ACGS, but at least the Tsui/Ching original kept things moving forward quickly with a non-stop barrage of edits and images, not least of which was a night-time pursuit through a forest by a giant tongue. The new ACGS falters badly in the middle, spending far too much time on chatter instead of chills. Where the original had a delightfully spooky interlude involving Leslie narrowly escaping the clutches of stop-motion animated zombies, this one has Siu Sin and Ning hiding out in a deserted building and…well, talking. And talking. Call me shallow, but in a movie like this I’ll take goofy-looking zombies any day over the hero’s melancholic ramblings about his childhood.

There are certainly plenty of lovely images in ACGS2011, though (my favorite is a sequence in which the tree demon traps Koo in a literal sea of leaves, and he finally stops fighting and lets himself float atop the leaf-waves), and lots of nods to both the original film and other Tsui Hark movies as well (a pair of giggling snake demons are obviously an homage to Tsui’s Green Snake). The actors are all capable, if none begin to capture the luminescent star appeal of Cheung and Wang; the dependable Koo comes off best¸ making his gruff Taoist warrior both stalwart and funny (although no one could touch actor Wu Ma’s delirious drunken Taoist from the original ACGS). There are also some decent fight scenes and a few lovely sets; the score is fairly typical for a big modern Chinese historical epic these days, hardly comparable to James Wong and Romeo Diaz’s lovely songs and soundtrack from ACGS1987. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here to top the original’s final battle in Hell, but maybe the producers of ACGS2011 thought it best to simply not even try.

Overall, I’d probably only recommend the new ACGS to fans of the original, who will be entertained by the in-jokes and hat-tips (including the use of the original film’s main song). For newcomers looking to make an entry into the world of Chinese horror/fantasy films, though…trust me and stick to the original. I re-watch it every so often, and thanks in part to Tsui and Ching’s deft blending of horror, humor and romance, and the presence of the two stars, it still holds up splendidly. I wish I could say I’d be re-watching the new ACGS a quarter-of-a-century from now, but somehow it seems doubtful.

(This column originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of The Black Glove.)

Here’s how big a Miyazaki geek I am: A few years ago, when SPIRITED AWAY was about to open in the U.S., I found out that Miyazaki would be in L.A. for one press conference…in a few hours. I immediately got on the phone and pestered a friend who had Disney connections until he figured out a way to get me into the conference. I ditched work, I pretended to be a journalist, I sat in the El Capitan theater with 20 real reporters and critics and just basked in the knowledge that I was thirty feet away from genius.

Hayao Miyazaki is one of the world’s great filmmakers. And no, I didn’t forget to include the word “animated” in that sentence, because I rank him with Lynch, Scorsese, Fincher, Tsui, Kim Ji-woon, and any other great live-action director you might mention. Miyazaki’s skill in telling stories visually is unsurpassed; his personal obsessions are consistent from film to film, and yet always seem uniquely rendered. And I believe he’s alone in world cinema in being a filmmaker who has made a substantial number of feature films (ten to date as director) and has never made one that wasn’t superb. I’d argue that he has given us at least two full-on masterpieces, perhaps more.

The above-mentioned SPIRITED AWAY is one of those two, and is possibly the closest to a dark fantasy that Miyazaki has come (although the science fiction-themed NAUSICAA, with its vision of an ecologically-devastated earth roamed by giant mutant animals, is probably more genuinely disturbing). It also provides a fine example of why Miyazaki is a brilliant filmmaker. Look at the beginning: Chihiro is a pre-pubescent girl who is pouting in the back seat of her car as her father drives them to a new home. Dad gets lost along the way, and they wind up facing a strange, dark tunnel. Curious about where it leads, Dad parks the car and the family steps out to investigate. Miyazaki goes for textbook-perfect shots – low angles up on Dad, emphasizing his size and confidence, high angles down on Chihiro, who looks around nervously, and tracking shots moving through light into darkness and back again. But Miyazaki isn’t just going by the letter here; he’s also setting up the film’s mythology with firm, brief strokes. The first twenty minutes of SPIRITED AWAY speaks to the subconscious on some level that most filmmakers can only begin to touch; Miyazaki instinctively understands the universal meaning of tunnels, of bridges, of dusk, of abandoned buildings, of whistling wind and half-glimpsed shadows. On the other side of the tunnel Chihiro and her parents discover a desolate amusement park, and as the sun sets, food magically appears in the dusty restaurants. Chihiro instinctively knows something is wrong, but her parents ignore the warnings and gorge themselves on the exotic food. The little girl wanders off and finds a boy, Haku, who tells her to flee before the sun has completely set. When Chihiro returns to her parents, she discovers she’s too late – they’ve transformed into pigs, and she’s now trapped in a world of shuffling spirits.

The rest of SPIRITED AWAY is a gorgeous, wondrous, awe-inducing hero(ine)’s quest, as Chihiro learns how to survive in this realm of gods and spirits. Some of it’s whimsical, some of it’s genuinely violent (a dragon’s fight with enchanted paper airplanes is as bloody as any PG-13 live-action thriller), but it never stops feeling as if Miyazaki has opened a doorway into some universal subconscious. That’s a remarkable thing to say, considering that the film is also steeped in Japanese symbolism and mythology (the amusement park turns out to be a resort for “eight million gods”). But the layers don’t end there, because Miyazaki also works in his usual themes of nature vs. industrialization (one of the visitors to the resort is a river god who has been turned into a sludge monster as a result of tons of dumped rubbish), the value of work (by taking a job at the resort to survive, Chihiro turns from a sullen child to an assured young adult), the liberation of flight, and the place of girls in society (nearly all of Miyazaki’s films feature youthful female protagonists).

When I saw Miyazaki at that press conference, someone asked him what he was proudest of in SPIRITED AWAY, and his answer was astonishing: “I am proudest of the fact that this film ends with a little girl on a train.” Technically that’s not completely accurate – SPIRITED AWAY runs for another 15 minutes or so after Chihiro’s train ride from the resort out to see a distant sorceress who she hopes will save her friend Haku. But Chihiro’s character has completed her arc as soon as she gets on the train – she has chosen to make the unknown trek for Haku over either her own safety or her parents’, who are in danger of being eaten soon – and the train ride through lonely, twilight realms, feels like an epiphany. Even though Chihiro must still confront a sorceress and solve a riddle to save her parents, those scenes are wrapped up quickly. SPIRITED AWAY really is over already.

However, one film in Miyazaki’s canon is even more unconventional than SPIRITED AWAY in terms of how it dispenses with the usual rules of storytelling, and it’s Miyazaki’s other masterpiece: MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO. Here’s what is most stunning about TOTORO: Absolutely nothing happens in it…and it’s impossibly compelling. Really – there’s no real plot, no villain whatsoever, no ticking clock, no b-storyline, no big action scenes. The story (such as it is) follows a father who has moved his two young girls to the country while they wait for their mother to convalesce from a serious illness. In the old country house, they first encounter small dust spirits, but the girls soon meet Totoro, a huge spirit of the surrounding forest who looks like a cross between a cat, a teddy bear, and a squirrel. Totoro takes them for rides in Catbus, a vehicle that resembles Alice’s Cheshire Cat and roams the countryside at night on multiple legs.

And that’s it. Well, there’s a dramatic climax when the youngest child, Mei, runs away in fear that her mother will never recover, but that’s the closest TOTORO comes to a plot point.

But it hardly matters, because TOTORO is one of the most genuinely magical, delightful films ever made. It’s about how we commune with nature when young, and how we can retain that sense of wonder. It’s also breathtakingly beautiful; the backgrounds are all suitable for framing, exquisitely painted scenes of trees and fields and deep, dark forests.

No discussion of Miyazaki would be complete without mentioning his musical collaborator, Joe Hisaishi. It’s interesting how often great directors are made greater by a partnership with a great composer – think Hitchcock and Herrmann, or Lynch and Badalamenti. It’s impossible to imagine NAUSICAA without that throbbing electronic music, or HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE sans the full orchestral waltz-inspired theme. Hisaishi provides the ears to Miyazaki’s eyes…and heart.

In the interest of focusing mostly on what I consider to be Miyazaki’s two best films, I’m ignoring others that I’d probably consider equally as fine while viewing them. PORCO ROSSO, about a World War I aviator who has chosen to live as a pig, apart from humans (yes, Miyazaki has a pig thing), and PRINCESS MONONOKE, which features a dying protagonist and a feral wolf girl, are his two most adult works; KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE is about a teenaged witch forced to live alone at 13, and features one of cinema’s great cats (her familiar, Jiji);

LAPUTA – CASTLE IN THE SKY is Miyazaki’s most steampunk film, with a sky full of brass-plated flying machines and floating cities; and his last film, PONYO, includes images that have haunted me since I saw them (specifically, two children sailing a toy boat over a flooded forest while massive, armored, Devonian-era creatures swim just beneath them). The latter film, by the way, also demonstrates Miyazaki’s skill in dismissing stereotype when it comes to endings: The title character, the fish who has become a human girl, has unleashed magic that could destroy the world unless her friend Sosuke can save her…which he does by assuring her goddess mother that he will love her no matter what form she’s in. Miyazaki has brilliantly defied expectations (a battle between sea gods and magicians!) to offer instead a lovely message about tolerance.

If you haven’t really delved deeply into Miyazaki yet, the good news is that Disney has released most of his films on DVDs now, with both subtitles and dubs. Most of the dubbing is quite good (especially SPIRITED AWAY, in which the vocal performance of Suzanne Pleshette as the witch Yubaba may even surpass that of the original Japanese actress), but some of the English-language performances really strike discordant notes. If you can handle subtitles, go for it; you’ll almost always get the better performances, and you’ll know they’re exactly what The Man himself had in mind.

(This column originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of The Black Glove.)

Back in 1998, there was a book that came out called “Mondo Macabro” by Pete Tombs that rocked my cinematic world. The book’s subtitle – “Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around the World” – gives you just the tiniest hint of the wonders that are to be found in this amazing tome. Where most other books on cult or exploitation movies were covering the same old tired ground (really, how many essays praising Herschell Gordon Lewis as an auteur do we need?) and revisiting movies we’d not only heard of but actually seen, Mondo Macabro was presenting us with stuff like Indian horror movies by the Ramsay Brothers and a crazy Japanese flick called Exorsister and something deliriously titled Satanico Pandemonium. They had an inspiring section on Tsui Hark, and, back in the days when the internet was little more than a bunch of ugly graphics that still took forever to load on your dial-up connection, they were an amazing resource.

But one movie stood out even among the wonders described in Mondo Macabro. One movie sounded so marvelously strange and received such high praise that I instantly went running to every video store and distributor in town searching for it.

Nobody had Mystics in Bali.

I hated Pete Tombs. This guy made this 1981 Indonesian cheapie sound like the most kickass thing EVER, and now it was turning out to be more like the mythological Holy Grail (I’m not kidding, either – even its eventual DVD box art referred to it as “The Holy Grail of Asian Cult Cinema”). It was impossible to find. Descriptions of it – the plot was supposed to center on an Indonesian creature called the leyak, which was a disembodied head flying around trailing its own innards – formed strange and glorious pictures in my mind.

Finally, five years after the publication of Mondo Macabro, a wonderful thing happened: Mondo Macabro became a DVD company, and Mystics in Bali was one of their first releases.

Then it went out of print almost immediately.

I’d missed the damned thing again. Occasional copies that turned up online were astronomical in price. I decided this was a movie I was destined to never see.

Then, in 2007, I heard that Mondo Macabro was about to re-release it in a remastered version. This time I didn’t wait: I pre-ordered that bastard. It was a magical day when it finally arrived.

So, was it worth the wait? Did it live up to its street rep as (in the words of one website review) “one of the most psychedelic experiences you’ll ever have in front of a television set”?

Wellllll…

Do cheese and Asian food ever go well together?

I’m going to dispense with my usual well-reasoned and carefully analytical approach here and just describe this bitch, because that’s really the only way to do it justice.

The credits alone let you know what you’re in for: As drums pound on the soundtrack, a bunch of Indonesian masks are held up before the camera and shaken, all behind credits that look like a font designed by a nearsighted five-year-old. The story: An American student named Cathy has come to Indonesia to study black magic; she’s already adept at voodoo (she really looks like a voodoo expert), and has heard about the Indonesian leyak. Her boyfriend, an Indonesian who looks strangely like Lionel Richie, takes her to a remote island and arranges for her to meet the ultimate leyak master, who has foot-long nails, a nastyass wig, and who laughs a lot. And laughs. And laughs.

The next night they return to see the master again. This time the shapeshifting master appears as a giant tongue, who drinks the blood they’ve brought (“This is really good blood!”), engraves some designs in Cathy’s leg, and gives her a cloth with magic symbols (“It’s all a lot of mumbo jumbo to me,” exclaims Cathy, the voodoo expert). The next night Cathy returns to the creepy forest to meet the master alone. More laughter announces the master’s arrival (what, was this leyak master a failed standup comedian?). This time the master performs a lot of spastic movements and laughs until Cathy starts laughing, too (Cathy, however, is such a supremely bad actress that you may not be sure if she’s laughing or trying to clear her throat). Cathy’s face begins to distort. She and the leyak master bounce around for a few seconds in completely stupid pig costumes, then turn all the way into pigs.

The next day she tells Lionel – er, I mean, Mahendra – about her porcine adventures, and Mahendra goes to see his uncle to ask about how to fight this evil magic (apparently he doesn’t want to believe that his girlfriend is really a pig). His uncle tells him he has mantras that will fight a leyak master, and he gives Mahendra a magic dagger.

Mahendra goes to see Cathy the next day, but she’s not feeling well (swine flu, perhaps?). That night she goes to see the leyak master again. You don’t think there’s more laughter involved, do you? In the middle of the laughter, Cathy’s head suddenly lifts off her body (courtesy of possibly the worst optical effects ever), dangling guts. The master is in control of Cathy now, and sends her head flying off. Cut to: a woman in a jungle hut in labor. Cathy’s head and guts fly through the jungle (okay, this is pretty cool), attack the woman, and apparently suck the baby right out of her. We go back to the master laughing again.

Cathy’s head returns to her body, and she tells the master she’s learned enough and she’s done. But of course she’s not: On the way home (or is it another night? Who knows), she meets a mysterious woman (the leyak master turned young? Who knows?) and they both transform into snakes. Mahendra is hiding nearby, watching. The next morning he finds her asleep, kisses her awake, and she instantly vomits off green goo and live mice. Remind me not to kiss any Indonesian guys who look like Lionel Richie.

Cut to: A bunch of talking, grunting fireballs having a duel in the middle of the jungle. They laugh, snarl and explode some trees. One of them is dumber than the others, and turns into Cathy. She watches as the remaining two fireballs duke it out. It’s kind of like the WWF with lighter fluid. One of the fireballs finally flames out in a less-than-spectacular display of optical effects. The remaining fireball turns into the leyak master, who tells us she’s finally defeated her enemy. Laughter ensues.

The next day, Cathy starts having neck pains, and off goes her head. A young woman watches. Laughter. Cathy wakes up later and finds her face covered blood. “Must have been a dream,” this brainiac mutters. “Guess I bit my lip!” They don’t get much smarter than Cathy. I hope this isn’t how Indonesians see all Americans.

The girl who saw the flying head tells Mahendra’s uncle, who meets with a council of do-gooders who try to figure out what to do. They reveal that if the leyak master takes one more life, her power will be complete. Uncle wants to handle this quickly…so he goes off to meditate.

The leyak master appears to Cathy the next night as a beautiful and wildly overacting young woman. She tells Cathy she wants “hot fresh blood”. “All right,” Cathy drolly intones, “I’ll get it for you…but not tonight.” I guess the local Hot Fresh Blood store is already closed. The leyak master laughs some more, then sends Cathy’s head off again. Mahendra’s uncle shows up at Cathy’s room, and finds her headless body; he drives some toothpicks into the neck stump (so much for mantras and meditation), and shows the body to Mahendra (“maybe Catherine’s being used by some evil supernatural forces now,” Uncle brilliantly suggests, after driving sizzling toothpicks into a neck stump). Meanwhile, a bunch of villagers confront the flying head and drive it back into the jungle. When it returns to the body, it just can’t get together, and the head flies off. Cathy’s body collapses.

Cathy’s body is buried the next day, and Uncle tells Mahendra they have to stop the head from rejoining the body. Mahendra is obviously heartbroken by Cathy’s death…or not (he nods when uncle tells him to “move on”). The next night, Uncle and Mahendra guard the grave. Cathy’s head and the Leyak master (inexplicably back to a deformed old crone) show up and laugh more. A bunch of really terrible optical effects ensue, scored by something that sounds roughly like cats wailing. The master attacks Uncle with some day-glo green animation, distracting him while Cathy’s head rejoins her body. The master rips out Uncle’s throat, kills another villager who attacks her (who turns out to be Mahendra’s ex – wow, talk about bad breakups), and attacks Mahendra, who performs a spectacular double somersault backwards into Cathy’s open grave. Suddenly a naked old guy dressed only in a sheet shows up, and turns out to be the great master Oka. He fires some pretty white animation at the leyak master, and the big duel’s on. The two big cheeses (yes, I mean that in every sense) battle it out. Leyak turns into a bipedal pig with huge boobs (I swear, I am NOT making any of this up), and is stabbed by Oka – at which point she turns into a sort of masked clown thing. Unfortunately, the leyak master has become so obsessed with laughter by the end of the climactic fight that she’s caught by the rising sun and melted away. Likewise, Cathy’s body collapses in Mahendra’s arms. He and Oka have won.

But have we? Well…Mystics in Bali is astoundingly bad on every level. The direction (by H. Tjut Djalil, complete with jerky pans and zooms and jump cuts), the acting, the dubbing, the cinematography (shots are often not even in focus), the script, the effects, are all so sub-par that they make the worst American children’s show of the 1970s look sophisticated by comparison. There’s not one single thing in this movie that’s genuinely frightening or disturbing.

But…damn, you can’t take your eyes off it. In the history of movies that work like train wrecks, this could well be the Hindenburg. If it’s not at all scary, there’s no denying that it’s a laugh riot (despite being filled with more annoying laughter than any other movie in history). It’s ridiculous and colorful and has just enough local color to be visually interesting and my GOD is it cheesy.

So, there you have it. Is Mystics in Bali good? Oh God no. But is it worth watching? Oh yeah. Just don’t expect outrageous Asian cinema on the order of Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain or Jigoku and you’ll probably enjoy it. Hey, want some cheese with that rice?

(This column originally appeared in the August 2011 edition of The Black Glove.)

First off, let’s get something straight: Kim Ji-woon’s new film I SAW THE DEVIL is not the most ultraviolent film ever made, contrary to the numerous reviews stating such. Hong Kong’s lunatic slasher of last year, DREAM HOME (which I previously reviewed for this column) had far more excessive gore. It was also – sadly – a better film.

I say “sadly” because I happen to believe that South Korea’s Kim Ji-woon is quite possibly the world’s greatest filmmaker, and I SAW THE DEVIL – despite its considerable flaws – doesn’t change that notion. There’s no question that every frame is extraordinary, and several shots are just plain jaw-dropping.

There are two big problems with I SAW THE DEVIL, though…or maybe three, if you count the fact that virtually every one of Kim’s other movies is a classic, especially his 2003 A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, which I call the finest horror film of the last thirty years.

I SAW THE DEVIL is a horror film about a serial killer, and it certainly begs comparisons to THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, SE7EN, and BLUE VELVET (it even includes a direct homage to David Lynch’s 1986 classic, when a kid poking through a field finds a bag containing a severed ear). It starts with a serial killer, Kyung-chul (played by South Korea’s number one bad guy Choi Min-sik, of OLDBOY and SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE) capturing and killing a young woman whose fiancé, Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hun), is a government agent. Soo-hyeon uses his police connections to track down Kyung-chul, but that’s just the beginning: He wants the murderer to suffer, so he releases Kyung-chul, tracks him down again, and so on.

The first third of I SAW THE DEVIL is promising, very effective, and incredibly tense. Lee Byung-hun, who’s done fine work for Kim previously in A BITTERSWEET LIFE and especially THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, is splendid as the tormented agent who shows us in excruciating detail the human tragedy behind an anonymous slaying. In fact, for a while it seems that I SAW THE DEVIL is going to explore this aspect, and it’s heart-wrenching to watch. Kim films the murders without any hint of exoticism or eroticism; they’re messy, painful, awful affairs that spread pain outward from the victim like ripples in a pond. Choi Min-sik plays the killer as pure id; Kyung-chul is a vicious, ugly, stupid man whose all-consuming hatred is directed primarily at women. I guarantee every woman who watches I SAW THE DEVIL will have one of those shivery moments of recognition; we’ve all encountered this man somewhere, and considered ourselves fortunate to walk away unscathed.

Here again, I SAW THE DEVIL offers up the potentially fascinating idea that a serial killer can be an ordinary, ugly man, lacking the charisma and charm of a Hannibal Lecter, the supernatural power of a Michael Myers, or the sheer, almost-comic oddness of a Leatherface…and yet after that forty minute mark, I SAW THE DEVIL makes the first of its big mistakes, when it introduces a second murderer who is indeed all those things, right down to even sporting a leather apron.

It’s asking a lot to expect an audience to buy that the government agent would continually release this walking ball of murderous fury (surprise! He kills whenever he’s freed again), but all pretense of logic flies out the window when Kyung-chul magically hooks up with an old buddy who is a cannibalistic killer. From this point on, I SAW THE DEVIL spirals ever downwards in terms of plausibility. Forget that everyone in this movie can endure endless beatings, stabbings, gougings, strangulations, and bashings; we accept this, after all, in horror movies, even those striving for some sense of realism. No, I SAW THE DEVIL’s script (by Park Hoon-jung) becomes a panoply of those eye-rolling moments that not even the world’s best director can save. Cops act like idiots, story elements are introduced (like two killer dogs) and then abandoned, major characters (Soo-hyeon’s almost-sister-in-law) are simply tossed aside, and even the most stalwart fan of Choi Min-sik’s performance will be screaming, “Just kill this guy already!”

Logic (or, more specifically, lack thereof) is one of I SAW THE DEVIL’s big problems, and the other is theme. After all those false starts, the movie really does come down to nothing more than “to pursue a monster is to become a monster”. There are no clever abrupt left turns here, no revelations (and this from the director of A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, which offered one of the most startling and perfect climactic revelations in all of cinema). The theme, which has been done to death in everything from cheap thriller novels to episodic television, would barely sustain a short, let alone a major feature. There are too many other interesting notions lurking just under the surface – like the toll murder exacts on survivors, or the notion that a serial killer is simply the craziest in a crazy world, or the suggestion that murderous misogyny might be commonplace – but none of those are what I SAW THE DEVIL finally chooses to end with, and more’s the pity.

But Kim’s astonishing direction still makes this a true cinematic experience. It takes some kind of genius to make an overhead shot of an unconscious girl being dragged through snow beautiful. Kim’s Korea is a place filled with joyless decay; even the mansion where Kyung-chul’s flesh-eating friend is encamped is a masterpiece of neo-Gothic design, a brooding example of rotting decadence. The film’s most astonishing scene happens in a cab, when Kyung-chul realizes the driver and his other passenger are robbers. Kyung-chul acts first, and what follows is one of those mesmerizing “how the hell did they do that?!” shots, as Kim’s camera whirls in 360 degrees around the three men in the cab as they fight each other, all while the cab careens out of control. It’s the kind of breathtaking cinema we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker who staged a chase across the Mongolian desert in his last film and a blood-drenched, hypnotic bullet ballet in the film before that.

I’m also a fan of Kim’s scores, and I SAW THE DEVIL is no exception. As with many other Korean soundtracks, Mowg’s music relies to great effect on acoustic guitar, although it shifts to heavy percussion for the action scenes. If it doesn’t quite cohere the way Lee Byung-woo’s gorgeous score for TWO SISTERS did, it’s nonetheless one of the more interesting scores to grace any film recently.

In the end, the best I can say is that I’d recommend I SAW THE DEVIL to those who like blood and are willing to endure a heap of illogic in exchange for plenty of brilliant direction. Don’t expect A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (or THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, for that matter), but if you can suspend some disbelief, you’ll enjoy the ride Kim and his two lead actors provide.

(This review was based on a viewing of the Korean theatrical version. I haven’t yet seen the international version released in the U.S., so your mileage may vary.)

(This review originally appeared in the May 2011 edition of The Black Glove.)