Harry here and this could be the greatest sounding movie since that whole Michael Jackson/Edgar Allan Poe thing... Read on....
Hey,
Just got back from watching "Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daehakno" at the Vancouver International Film Festival. It was an interesting movie, not quite what I expected.
They opened with 2 Korean shorts from a film academy in Korea.
The first, entitled "Goat's Lover" was pretty funny, and weird. It was about this monk who.. ahem... loves his neighbours' goat. The goat seems to love him back too. It was a rather amusing short.
Then we saw "Serious Battle", a semi-autobiographical piece about soldiers in the South Korean army in 1996. Most of the events took place in the sickbay, with a bunch of soldiers who are trying to avoid fighting. There's some comedy, such as the main soldier who always yells, but it was a bit dry overall.
Then came the feature film. According to the VIFF website, 'the Korean title translates as "The high-school student who got chopped up while selling herself in Daehakno is still in Daehakno." ' I was expecting a sort of asian Baise Moi type of film. The local newspaper reviewer compared the film to live action anime.
I don't really agree, but it was similar. They seemed to be going for sort of a Resident Evil-ish aesthetic. The movie was in Beta so it looked kind of pixelly (on purpose?)
The film was about a Korean hooker who dresses like a school girl and gets killed (multiple times) and comes back to kick some ass. It sounds like lots of fun but it was a bit off. The pace was kind of odd, there'd be funny parts and then slow parts and a lot of the time you couldnt' tell if it was serious and deep or black comedy. The ending was most definitely intended to be humourous though, and it got laughs from everyone.
The movie seemed to be about asian school-girl porn images, the kind related to anime like Sailor Moon, and the usual women kicking men's asses Thelma and Louise/Baise Moi themes. But in this case the control wasn't all necessarily in the girl's hands. There was also kind of a genital/gender identity thing going on with a strange pregnancy and the hooker's breast.
It was an interesting movie, but I think alot of people were made uncomfortable becasue it wasn't quite over the top enough to not take anything seriously.
- khayman
