The East is Red

The latest installment of “The East is Red” is now live at The Black Glove, and takes an affectionate look at Bong Joon-ho’s Mother:

The East is Red #14

Back in 1997, when I was starting to seriously explore my burgeoning interest in Asian cinema, I found a book called Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions by Stephen Teo; the book (which is now considered a sort of seminal study of Chinese cinema) was an eye-opener in many regards, but none more so than the references to a director named Ma-Xu Weibang and his 1937 film Song at Midnight. Teo said, “Ma-Xu was something of an iconoclast who virtually created the modern horror genre in Chinese cinema with Song at Midnight”; he also called the movie a “horror classic” and a “masterwork”. A year later, Song at Midnight was rediscovered on the film festival circuit (thanks, perhaps, to Teo’s work?), and it’s since been named to several “100 Best Chinese Films” lists. Needless to say, I had to see it.

My first copy was a blurry, cheap VCD (a video format that was huge in Hong Kong in the recent past, although it’s basically given way now to DVD) without subtitles. The print was awful – choppy, scratchy – but it didn’t matter. Song at Midnight was still frequently mesmerizing.

Before I launch into a synopsis, let me state right here: I’ve still never seen the film with subtitles, although I’ve purchased several different copies. I think there is one available now on DVD, and there’s some kind of downloadable subtitle file at Internet Archives (where you can also see the film for free), but I couldn’t get it to open. In the long run, it doesn’t matter; any horror fan should possess a passing familiarity with the plot of The Phantom of the Opera (which Song is loosely based on), and will have no trouble following the plot.

Song at Midnight may be based on Phantom of the Opera, but it absolutely owes a visual debt to Tod Browning’s Dracula. Ma-Xu was politically progressive (Teo describes him as “consumed with revolutionary zeal”) and he admired western art (in fact Song is scored with cues from classics like “Night on Bald Mountain” and even “Porgy and Bess”), so he certainly would have seen the early American horror classics. Song opens with a storm over a large deserted building (which is essentially a castle); the castle’s caretaker is a deformed, ancient man with a lantern. After an eerie wind blows through the halls, a silhouetted phantom appears and sings to the rundown house near the castle; an old woman appears, leading a nearly-catatonic young woman (who could easily pass for one of Dracula’s brides). The young woman listens to the song, emotion struggling just beneath her stony features.

Cut to: A theatrical troupe arrives in horse-drawn carriages. Caught in a torrential downpour, they try to take shelter in the castle, but are frightened off by cobwebs, snakes, rats, and strange hanging mannequins. After setting up camp nearby, they begin rehearsals. Our handsome young hero (who we’ll call “Raoul”, after the Leroux hero) has been assigned the lead in a musical, but he fails the audition, unable to sing the difficult song. Not long after, he hears a magnificent voice singing the piece, and he meets Song Danping, the phantom we saw earlier. Song tutors the young man, who scores a hit on opening night. Song also reveals his past to our Raoul: When he was young, he was an accomplished singer who ran afoul of an evil warlord when the warlord fell for Song’s girlfriend (who we saw earlier as the catatonic woman). The warlord had Song whipped, but when Song’s girlfriend failed to renounce her love for the singer, the warlord hired thugs to throw acid in Song’s face. In one of the most effective scenes in the film, Song’s family (including a child) care for him until the day they remove his bandages – and react in horror when they see his hideously mutilated face. Song, equally repulsed, flees to the deserted castle, where the caretaker becomes his only companion. When Song’s girlfriend is informed of his fate, she goes mad (in another wonderfully disturbing scene).

In the present, Song asks Raoul’s help in reaching his girlfriend. Raoul approaches her, and she mistakes him for Song; as a result of their encounter, she regains her sanity. Freed from having to watch over his love, Song turns to the warlord, who is now a middle-aged lecher with three wives. During a performance by the theater company, the warlord is smitten by Raoul’s girlfriend (who we’ll call Christine). After the performance, he bursts into her dressing room and tries to force himself on her. When Raoul runs in, the warlord tries to shoot him, but hits Christine instead; when he tries to flee the scene, Song blocks his escape. Song tries to hit the warlord with a jar of acid, but they fight and the jar breaks elsewhere. Song chases the warlord into the top of a tower, and finally succeeds in killing him.

Song tries to flee, but the villagers are in pursuit now. They chase him to a deserted tower overlooking the sea; they set fire to the tower, but Song throws himself into the water, leaving his ultimate fate uncertain.

Ma-Xu did indeed make a sequel to Song in 1941 (I’ve not seen the sequel). Some time later, he left Shanghai (where he’d made Song) and relocated to Hong Kong, where he produced one more horror classic, A Maid’s Bitter Story (also known as The Haunted House). I’ve still not seen that 1949 gem, but it’s on my radar.

Like Phantom of the Opera, Song has been remade several times, most famously in 1995 as Ronny Yu’s sumptuous, romantic The Phantom Lover, featuring the legendary Leslie Cheung as Song.

However, Ma-Xu’s 1937 original stands on its own. The scenes of horror still work surprisingly well, with Jin Shan giving a terrific, very physical performance as the tortured Song; even the make-up on him is very solid, easily surpassing Claude Rains’s burned face in the 1943 American version of Phantom. Ma-Xu had an obvious affection for expressionism as well, and the sets and high-contrast lighting create considerable mood and visual pleasure. With subtitles, I’ve no doubt that Song also has a potent political message about the evils of the aristocracy and the moral value of art.

Song at Midnight is frankly not recommended for the casual viewer just looking for a good night of entertainment. But for the serious lover of horror cinema – especially those who might think they know the canon, but haven’t seen Song – it’s a must-see.

(This column originally appeared in the July 2010 issue of The Black Glove.)

Quick: Name the last original Hollywood horror movie you saw that was any good. And by original, I mean it can’t be a sequel, a remake of an old Hollywood movie, or an American version of an Asian film. Because while Hollywood continues to suffer a marketing phobia that seems to render executives incapable of producing original American horror content (when they try and the results are good, like the recent TRICK ‘R’ TREAT, they end up dumping the unfortunate product direct to DVD), they continue to plunder Japanese and Korean cinemas for content to rape – er, I meant, of course, remake.

Latest case in point: BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE, a live action film based on the immensely popular Japanese anime feature/series/manga/novel/game empire. Although the live-action BLOOD was originally to have been directed by Ronny Yu (director of the neo-classic Hong Kong fantasy THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR) and has an Asian lead actress, it ended up with a French director and enough western elements that I think we can safely consider it to be close enough to a Hollywood remake to qualify.

Here’s what you need to know first: BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE in its live action version is an extraordinarily awful movie. It’s so bad that any mere review of it will quickly become redundant (“and THIS sucks, and THIS is rotten, and THIS is just really, really bad”). It is, in fact, so spectacularly bad that it should stand as an example of how NOT to adapt an Asian film. So, using BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE as my starting point, here is my Top Ten List of Points to Consider When Re-making an Asian Horror Movie.

(A brief synopsis before we begin: This latest incarnation of BLOOD is set in 1970, and begins in an American air base in Japan. It turns out that the base is infested with vampires, and a legendary half-human/half-vampire slayer, Saya, is sent to deal with the predators. Disguised as a student, Saya quickly ferrets out the bloodsuckers and slays them, but is observed by teenaged Alice, the base commander’s daughter. When Alice’s father begins to investigate Saya and the mysterious “Council” that sent her, he’s murdered, and Saya must now protect Alice from the Council. They flee together, and the chase leads them to Onegin, the ancient demonic ruler who killed Saya’s father and who she’s sworn to destroy. The film’s last scene revolves around their battle.)

1. Have at least a modicum of respect for the source material. The big movie of BLOOD contains very little of the original’s story, retaining not much beyond the idea of a Buffy-ish teenaged girl who is a superheroic slayer. A central notion to both the BLOOD anime and, indeed, the very title itself, was that Saya was fighting demonic creatures called “chiropterans”…not vampires. But apparently the makers of the BLOOD movie thought that we westerners were too stupid to follow a plot centering on creatures with a strange name, so they’ve simply called them vampires…completely disregarding that Saya is supposed to be the LAST vampire.

2. Don’t hire a music video director to helm the movie. Okay, yeah…I know that kind of worked for THE RING, with director Gore Verbinski. But this guy Chris Nahon is so obsessed with drenching every frame in music-video grunge effects and high-contrast yellows and greens that he seems to have forgotten there are actors and a so-called story to consider as well.

3. If you’re going to try to set the film in Japan, then honor the Japanese elements. The American remake of THE GRUDGE did this fairly well – although the film focused on an American family in Japan (and so allowed the filmmakers to use American stars like Sarah Michelle Gellar), the story wisely used culture clash to ramp up the tension. No such luck with BLOOD, which is theoretically set in Japan, but seems to be set in a Japan populated almost entirely by Americans and vampires. The only Japanese character featured prominently is Saya, and she’s little more than a silent fighter. Even the kendo teacher is American. And when we meet the “Elder” in charge of the Council, it’s an old white guy – apparently living alone in the middle of Japan. Jeez, would it have killed ‘em to make that guy Japanese, at least?!

4. If you’re going the American remake route, then get a solid American screenwriter. Okay, I should know from my own experience that what comes out of the actors’ mouths may not be even close to what was on paper…but dear God, BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE has some of the most laughably bad dialogue I’ve ever heard. My favorite line: After Alice has been rescued by Saya from hundreds of attacking vampires, and has watched her crash through brick walls, leap distances of 50 feet, and kill five vamps with a single hurled umbrella, she looks at Saya as they part and offers up, “Be really careful, okay?” Yes, ROTFLMAO is an appropriate response here.

5. If the film involves action, know how to shoot it. One of the pleasures of Asian cinema, of course, is the action. These guys have been doing fights from the beginning of their film industry, and it shows. Heck, some of the Asian movie awards even include categories for action choreography. Unfortunately, director Nahon seems to have decided that he could shoot action better than these dumb ol’ Asian guys, and he’s opted for the typical western mix of interminable slo-mo and confusing close-ups, rendering BLOOD’s lengthy fight sequences into incomprehensible mishmashes of color and motion. This is particularly sad because I have no doubt that BLOOD’s energetic lead performer could have handled any choreography they threw at her.
6. If you’re using Asian actors, don’t force them to speak lines phonetically. The only thing that BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE got right was the casting of its lead – gorgeous and gifted South Korean actress Jeon Ji-hyun (appearing here under the ridiculously anglicized name “Gianna”) handles her English lines well enough (in fact, her performance is BLOOD’s only saving grace), but the few other Japanese actors in the film who have to speak English rather obviously have no idea what they’re saying – they’re just struggling to get those syllables out.

7. And speaking of actors – don’t use dull or bad western actors. Would THE RING have been anything without Naomi Watts? BLOOD’s American actors (or Canadian, or British, or whatever they are) range from merely dull to over-the-top. Maybe these actors have all been good in other things, but I’ve never seen any of them before, so I don’t know.

8. Don’t rip off other movies/television shows to pad out the western content. In the anime BLOOD, Saya worked for “the Red Shield”, but in the movie she’s supervised by “the Council” – of Watchers, right? Hey, where’s Giles? And what’s with those vampire makeups – haven’t I seen those in BLADE (which, not coincidentally, also features a human/vamp hybrid)?

9. Don’t dumb down the source material. It’s really sad when an anime – which addressed issues like Japanese feelings towards Americans and the role of women in Japanese society – is infinitely smarter than a live action film. Look at the live action DEATH NOTE(s) by comparison: They stuck closely to the original anime/manga, and the resulting films were superb. Oh, wait – the live action DEATH NOTE films were also Japanese. I bet the eventual Hollywood remake will be dumber than dirt.

10. I wish I could say just don’t bother. Really. Note to Hollywood: Just buy American distribution rights and release the originals over here. Yeah, yeah, I know: Americans don’t watch subtitled movies and don’t wanna see a bunch of Asian actors and blahblahblah. And unfortunately THE RING and THE GRUDGE made a bundle. So I suppose we’re doomed to continue seeing wonderful Asian movies ground up in the Hollywood mill until they dribble out as cinematic gruel on the other end.

And that is why I’ll keep on writing this column: If I get even a few more of you to see the Asian originals, then I can rest happy. And so can you.

(This column originally appeared in the June 2010 issue of The Black Glove.)

Really, I hadn’t planned on doing yet another South Korean entry this time around. I was going to write eloquently about SONG AT MIDNIGHT, the 1937 Chinese classic that may just be the great granddaddy of all Asian horror films…

…but then I saw Yim Pil-sung’s 2007 HANSEL AND GRETEL, and both SONG AT MIDNIGHT and my eloquence flew out the figurative window.

If you think that means HANSEL AND GRETEL is extraordinary, you’re right. It’s easily the most interesting Korean horror film since Kim Ji-woon’s 2003 classic A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, and it’s probably no coincidence that both films draw their inspiration from fairy tales. However, where TWO SISTERS picks up from a traditional Korean story, Yim spins his layered and complex story from a head-on collision of east meets west. Think a Grimm’s fairy tale (or Del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH, which HANSEL AND GRETEL has been frequently compared to, and which I frankly think it trumps) walked through a Korean haunted house, and you’ll start to get some idea.

The story starts with a young man, Eun-soo, losing control of his car on an isolated road. He awakens to find a red-caped young girl, Young-hee, standing over him. She leads him through the dense forest to a picturesque house, where Eun-soo meets the rest of her family, including her older brother Man-bok and younger sister Jung-soon. Everything in the house is plainly geared to accommodate the children: The décor is colorful and whimsical, the diet made up of cupcakes and cookies, and the parents a little too loving. After mom and dad mysteriously vanish, Eun-soo tries to find his own way back, but time and again he loses his way in the forest, only to return to the house. When other adults arrive, Man-bok’s edge of anger reveals itself more and more, and Eun-soo realizes he’s trapped with the children, who want him to become their “uncle”. Is the source of the children’s power their storybook copy of HANSEL AND GRETEL, or does the increasingly aggressive Man-bok hold the answer?

To say more would be to give away some of the many delicious twists of the script. Just know that this turns out to be neither a non-supernatural psychological thriller (there’s an attic that becomes a maze, a human doll, and people who are punished by being turned into trees), nor a gentle fantasy (one hard-to-watch sequence involves graphic child abuse and suggested molestation). Like the afore-mentioned PAN’S LABYRINTH, HANSEL AND GRETEL isn’t afraid to show the excessive cruelty that drives these children into a fantasy world; in fact, its images of children being starved and beaten are far more intense than a thousand tortureporn scenes. And because this is a sort of inverted version of the traditional tale of two children who trap a wicked witch in her oven, there is indeed a disturbing sequence of a character being roasted alive and even some graphic cannibalism.

But this isn’t just a wild funhouse ride. Yim’s film isn’t afraid to ask big questions: Does fantasy empower us, or cripple us? Is our notion of innocent childhood nothing but a fiction created by embittered adults? One of the children repeatedly asks Eun-soo, “Are children happy in your world?”, and the young man – who was himself abandoned by his mother at a young age – has no honest answer. Comfort is fleeting in HANSEL AND GRETEL; traditional sources of care including adults, family, and religion (the most vicious adult visitor claims to be a deacon) are all revealed as shams.

And yet, remarkably, HANSEL AND GRETEL is not overwhelmingly depressing or relentlessly grim (no pun intended). The remarkable set design by Ryu Seong-hie (who also provided the superb design for OLD BOY and THE HOST) gives the film a delightfully cluttered and vibrant look. Yim and Ryu have also packed the film with sly and amusing nods to the mayhem underlining it all: Toys are blood-stained, rabbits have the manic stare of something from David Lynch’s world, and a running cartoon on the house’s ancient black-and-white television set depicts stuffed animals mauling each other.

Also noteworthy is Lee Byung-woo’s sumptuous score. The music bears some resemblance to the rich, tragedy-infused work Lee composed for A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, but incorporates children’s voices as well, producing one of the loveliest and most haunting soundtracks heard in years.

Sadly, Yim doesn’t seem to have produced another feature film in the three years since HANSEL AND GRETEL (which apparently received mixed response in Korea, where audiences were somewhat puzzled by the western references, which include a visit from Santa Claus and cowboys-and-indians sheets on one bed). Likewise, his star Cheon Jeong-myeong, who imbues Eun-soo with both great likability and a wonderful sense of tragedy, hasn’t appeared in a feature film since. Here’s hoping that not only will we see more work especially from the gifted Yim soon, but that we’ll see more films that can come close to achieving HANSEL AND GRETEL’s level of art, visuals, and wrenching emotions.

(This column originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of The Black Glove.)

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Park Chan-wook’s THIRST.

It’s certainly not that I mind that Park, known in the past for his non-supernatural thrillers, has made a real, honest-to-God vampire film. Nor do I mind that THIRST isn’t just a horror film, but mixes genres in a crazy quilt approach that throws in black comedy, love story, and philosophical art film; after all, Park’s last movie, the delightfully nutty I’M A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OKAY crossed science fiction, romantic comedy, and action film in its story of two mentally disturbed and incarcerated young people who fall in love (while experiencing a variety of delusions).

But I think what bothers me about THIRST is that it somehow feels like the first film in which Park has become seriously aware of his own reputation.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, Park’s OLDBOY came exploding out of his native South Korea a few years ago to become a global sensation. The thriller, starring Choi Min-sik as a man inexplicably held in captivity for 15 years, and then just as inexplicably released one day, captured legions of fans for Park around the world. It became equally famed for its sheer outrageousness (especially a scene in which Choi Min-sik clearly eats a live octopus), and its twist ending. A few already knew Park as the director of two excellent earlier thrillers, the small, tense JOINT SECURITY AREA (2000), about an incident along the South Korean/North Korean border, and the more flamboyant SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (2002), which inaugurated his “Vengeance” trilogy, with OLDBOY serving as Part 2 and SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (2005) completing the series. LADY VENGEANCE happens to be my personal favorite of Park’s films; it features brilliant performances from both Lee Yeong-ae in the title role, as a woman imprisoned for killing her child who plots a devious revenge on the real murderer, and again, Choi Min-sik as the school teacher-cum-child killer. The film is a brilliantly constructed series of set pieces, complete with loads of inverted morality (is our heroine wrong in her pursuit of vengeance?), and some stunning action scenes, especially one in which the Lady is forced to pursue two bad guys because her exquisite custom-made gun is only accurate at a few feet.

After making LADY VENGEANCE, Park gave us a tiny taste of vampirism in his short “Cut”, which appeared in the anthology film THREE: EXTREMES. Although the main thrust of “Cut” is another vengeance story involving a movie director, the piece opens with a strange and funny scene of a cinematic vampire (played with delicious over-the-top gusto by A TALE OF TWO SISTERS’ stepmother, Yum Jung-Ah) experiencing a gruesome form of heartburn as a result of her last victim.

If “Cut” suggested that Park’s take on vampirism would be less than completely serious, it certainly couldn’t have predicted the odd mishmash that is THIRST.

The main vampire in THIRST is a troubled priest, Sang-hyun (played by the gifted and versatile Song Kang-ho, last seen as “Blondie” in THE HOST and the “Weird” part of Kim Ji-woon’s THE GOOD, THE BAD, WEIRD); Sang-hyun beats himself to banish sexual thoughts, and eventually volunteers for a potentially-lethal medical study. Inoculated with a deadly virus, Sang-hyun survives, but it isn’t until he returns to his parish that he discovers he’s become a vampire. The vampirism creates more than a desire for blood in the reborn priest, and he becomes involved with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), a lonely young orphan who is treated like a dog by her adoptive mother (now her mother-in-law) and her husband, the boorish Kang-woo (played by Park regular Shin Ha-kyun). A particularly twisted triangle (involving some of the squirmiest sex scenes ever put on film) ends up leading to murder, a haunting, and vampiric mass killings.

It’s tempting to suggest that the biggest problem with THIRST is the literal interpretation of vampirism as metaphor for Catholic guilt. That element has been present in stories of the undead ever since Stoker recreated bloodsucker mythology in DRACULA, bringing in Victorian sexual repression and the benevolent power of Christian faith; to make that the text itself, rather than the subtext, almost seems obvious. And yet it’s also undeniably clever, to finally move the vampire’s secret meaning into the light, by making the monster into a priest who is overcome by sexual and murderous desires.

What’s most troubling about THIRST, though, is its odd pace and occasionally static compositions. It’s the first time that Park has made a movie that feels like an arthouse film; the editing is choppy, with vignettes that begin and end in fade-ins and fade-outs, and the production design becomes more deliberately artificial as the film progresses (who lights their house with fluorescent bulbs hung from the ceiling at angles, dangling only by their wires?). OLDBOY was deservedly famous for its single-take long fistfight scene, a fluid masterpiece of direction that sustained tremendous energy and motion without any cuts; but in THIRST the action scenes feel artificial and less original. One scene, in which Sang-hyun leaps from the top of a skyscraper while carrying a gleeful Tae-ju, has some of the sheer filmmaking joy that has permeated Park’s earlier films, but THIRST could have used more of that propulsive motion.

THIRST is also a surprise on the acting front. Song Kang-ho, usually the most unpredictable of performers, downplays Sang-hyun to the point of making him deliberately bland; fortunately, though, young Kim Ok-bin is more than happy to step in and steal the film, with a passionate, lunatic performance that gets more demented as the film progresses. She’s charismatic and compelling as the girl who undergoes her own strange rebirth, and her performance is probably the single best thing about THIRST.

As a vampire film, THIRST eschews the Chinese “hopping vampires” and instead hews to most of the Western traditions – these vamps suck blood, are immensely strong, and fry in sunlight – but one of the tropes it lacks is a vampire hunter. The film’s heroes are also its villains, and it’s fairly clear from the beginning (no spoiler alert needed here) that Sang-hyun’s guilt will finally damn him for good. While the philosophical aspects of this are interesting, it does create a curious lack of impetus, especially in the second half of THIRST – there’s no exterior conflict to propel the plot, no forces of good closing in, no exciting chase or fight.

I suspect that, some years down the road, THIRST will be more of a curiosity in Park’s resume than a much-lauded and studied work, like OLDBOY or LADY VENGEANCE. It will be interesting to see what direction his sensibilities will head in after this – will he continue down the path of the more formalized art film, or head into entirely new territory? We can only hope for the latter.

(This column originally appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Black Glove)