Little Otik (2000)

 

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Cast: Veronika Žilková as Božena Horáková, Jan Hartl as Karel Horák, Kristina Adamcová as Alžbětka, Jaroslava Kretschmerová as Alžbětka's Mother, Pavel Nový as Alžbětka's Father, Dagmar Stríbrná as Pani spravcova (the caretaker), Zdenek Kozák as Mr. Žlábek

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)/Canon Fodder

 

Jan Švankmajer’s tale of a couple who merely wanted a child, but cannot, opens with such strange images like the husband envisioning a fishmonger wrapping a baby up in newspaper outside the pregnancy clinic. Unable to have children due to medical sterility, the couple’s life takes a drastic turn when, as a sweet joke, the husband Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) finds a tree stump that looks like a child vaguely and dresses it up as one, only for Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) to literally take the carved and varnished stump as a literal child to his horror. After a contrived nine month pregnancy they fake, a be-careful-for-what-you-wish-for tale transpires when after this pregnancy the tree stump now christened Otik comes to life.

Švankmajer had nearly three decades as a stop motion animator before this film, working on shorts and even one music video for Hugh Cornwell named Another Kind of Love (1988), before he made his first theatrical film with Alice (1988), an Alice in Wonderland interpretation which is whimsical, if surreal and embraces macabre horror tropes, more so as he used real taxidermy animal and bones to create some of the denizens of his Wonderland. Švankmajer made his craft from his native Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic literally animating anything from paper furniture to paper, his later films after Little Otik going onto real cow tongues (Lunacy (2005)) to photo cutouts in Surviving Life (2010), and his work here embraces a macabre humour contrasting the tragedy that will transpire.

For the Horáks, children are what are important for their community in the apartment complex as much as they sincerely want kids, not just take the cat out on a leash for walkies. Whether a good thing or not, it is turned into an obsession that is not just that of Alžbětka (Kristina Adamcová), the one child in the complex lamenting the lack of other children, and overenthusiastic to the point of reading medical texts about sterility and “slow semen”. The set up is from a fairy tale, of the Otesánek by Karel Jaromír Erben which is retold in fairy tale illustrations animated onscreen, but it is streaked by Švankmajer as a card carrying surrealist skewering the weird ritual of proud parents and those around the Horaks who celebrate their consummation of parenthood. Alžbětka’s obsession is as an over inquisitive child, but her mother celebration of the fake pregnancy cycle in the first act is as odd when viewed from afar, as is Mr. Horák being congratulated at work with drinks. Children are a positive thing in the right context, an important moment for any parent even with adopted sons and daughters to undertake, but the ritual is seen as having existed for its own sake. With Mr. Horak’ early hallucinations of babies being everywhere before the tree stump is literally dug out, their wish for parenthood is arguably one as much pressured and forced onto people even when they wish and feel lost without this in their lives.

Švankmajer uses his career to prod at human behavior in its curiosities in the theatrical and short length films. Virile Games (1988) mocked the sport of soccer as a television event as much for an excuse for significant food consumption as much as violence, whilst Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), the theatrical film before this one, whilst sympathetic to its anthology cast was about sexual fetishes, done with the least conventional ones where his own hand crafted pieces for the film, like kitchen utensils like rolling pins fashioned to give pleasurable massages with artificial tongues, matched how all the pieces within itself showed these men and women painstakingly crafting the items and costumes needed for their elaborate sexual fantasies, even the man who dresses up as a papier-mâché bird creature to swoop on a woman who has a stand in he also built.  With Alžbětka’s father always watching adverts on TV and getting drunk constantly, or the really twisted joke you normally would never get, that the old man in the complex is a pervert eyeing up Alžbětka, you see Švankmajer turning ordinary Czech lives into his creations to scrutinize them, as he did literary sources. His obsession with food, the destructive act of eating and its strangeness, is the most prominent example of this from his entire filmography and perfect to see here, as Otik when he comes alive is very hungry and, as he grows, even the post man isn’t safe. Food has been one of Švankmajer’s obsessions for his whole career, continuing it even in one-off surreal moments here like nails being seen in a broth or a sentient breathing pancake.

This is one of his most robust narratives too, where the first act fully sets up the sick humored turn to Otik’s parents having to hide his consumed victims. Little Otik at that point definitely belongs to the horror genre among others as, stripping his food down to freshly bloodied bones by his crib, or guts and blood split on the glass of his bedroom’s windowed door, we will see Otik move from an incredible piece of stop motion magic to a giant practical suit and off-camera implications. Otik himself, let alone the rest of the animation in the film, is visibly the craft of a veteran animator (and all his collaborators on this production) who had four decades before the film to hone his skills, let alone is an acclaimed artist in his own right in various forms of materials shown in galleries over the decades after. Just Otik himself in his initial living version is the result of having to find and put together real pieces of wood visible for all the titular child’s mannerisms and facial expressions in his initial form. All the stop motion in general, whilst at this point in his theatrical career fully focused on making sure his human actors and their performances also suit, had to be painstakingly put together even for pure gags, with the knowledge Švankmajer’s trait of not using conventional items for the motion would have added new challenges for him and an animation team to work with. Even if giant Otik becomes an entity not shown fully onscreen when his parents finally lock him down in the coal cellar of the apartment complex, I see they depict his hands with real twigs that had to be painstakingly collected and likely led to multiple hands needed to accomplish the whole film.

Švankmajer is truly an artist but, whilst Alice is a masterpiece in its own right, the real turn by Conspirators of Pleasure and this film is that he fully embraced these longer films for being dramas too. Whilst Alice focused on one young girl in the lead and his stop motion, here he has a full cast and it feels he felt completely comfortable there too. Actors did exist in his short films, and one The Garden (1968) is entirely around people without animation its central focus, but you see here he found a new side to filmmaking he embraced as he made more theatrical length films which had longer stories. A corpse humour, even pure silliness, is found in the performances too to be as dynamic as the animation, the tragedy matched with the farce. He finds humour in, say, a man pretending to be the postman your child ate and post his mail deliveries at night, even if it leads to questions from far away onlookers of why the postman is late posting his mail. Or the nonchalant conversation that, if forced horrifically to cut your tree child to pieces, you can just ask your soused neighbor for his chainsaw with no questions asked.

Because of this, the story is as good, with its own twisted turns as, with the naivety of a child but her innocence causing as much harm, Alžbětka in the second half befriends Otik in his cellar confinement. Feeding the local pedophile to him is one thing the viewers will applaud, but when she has no qualms in debating to feed anyone including her family members to him, when she cannot get any food for him anymore, you see a nasty little parable about how childhood for all its innocence has a naivety which does not process the consequences of life and death. This can be revealed in as a subversion of proper etiquette but it also shows that, like with Otik himself, our perceived notion of the beautiful innocence of children is just as strange and deserves to be subverted as seen in both children we follow here, all needing to be resolved by the elderly female neighbor in the end. Tellingly the film ends before this inevitable finale to stop all this is seen onscreen, as Švankmajer has already told his parable in its fullest with the fairy tale sequences telling Karel Jaromír Erben’s original story. The parable is this strange tale of wanting a child regardless of the cost, and its sickly humored morals close us out before the unfortunately meeting of an Otik with a garden hoe because that was always inevitable, whilst the journey itself is the delirious and impressive ride we had just experienced over two hours.

Versus (2000)

Director: Ryuhei Kitamura

Screenplay: Ryuhei Kitamura and Yūdai Yamaguchi

Cast: Tak Sakaguchi as Prisoner KSC2-303, Hideo Sakaki as The Man, Chieko Misaka as The Girl, Kenji Matsuda as Yakuza Leader with butterfly knife, Yuichiro Arai as Motorcycle-riding yakuza with revolver, Minoru Matsumoto as Crazy yakuza with amulet, Kazuhito Ohba as Yakuza with glasses, Takehiro Katayama as Red-haired assassin, Ayumi Yoshihara as Long-haired female assassin, Shōichirō Masumoto as One-handed cop, Toshiro Kamiaka as Samurai warrior, Yukihito Tanikado as Cop with Barrett

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Why did I hate a film once made with hard work and independent grit, a two hour epic combining martial arts, splatter horror and post-Matrix cool? Apparently, because a younger self could not appreciate such good aspects, thus providing evidence youth does not mean good taste. There is unfortunately details I came to learn in regards to this production, which is not the fault of Versus but the inherent problem with any work with people involved who can reveal through themselves the ugly side of human beings, that I had to begin this review with and will have to talk of, as these came like sudden thunderbolts to learn at the worse time, when coming finally around the Versus as a film. As a film itself, this tragic detail is a shame as I can at least appreciate now that Ryuhei Kitamura put his time and effort into this project, one which was a difficult production just from the decision to make it an outdoor shot in the woodlands, liable to constant issues of weather conditions and practicality in getting through the shots with expected strain. Based on a mid-length film before, a lower budgeted project Down to Hell (1997), he took the idea from that of woodlands where those killed within its unholy grounds immediately return undead, and expanded upon it in a film which spun away from a sequel to its own concept. One evoking Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981), and its lore of gates directly to Hell, but specifying that there are 666 of them confirmed in Kitamura's world, and at the Forest of Resurrection where this film is set, this has the 444th.

The premise is very simple, and with hindsight, one can envision Versus, as a true independent production, as being the equivalent of a lot of micro-budgeted films from the West, usually shot in VHS in the past, which showed its creators wanting to make the films they grew up watching. The only difference with this was how it was able to put together production to create something very elaborate, one which managed to breakout to a wider audience through film festivals and distributors, in the case of the United Kingdom riding the wave of interest in Asian cinema into the 2000s that distributor Tartan Films made a huge part of their DVD era, with the Tartan Asian Extreme line this belonged to. Like a micro-budget film, the premise is simple, that two convicts have escaped the law, one of our lead and the closest with an actual name as Prisoner KSC2-303, played by future actor star Tak Sakaguchi in a breakout role. The set up is that these two convicts where to met a group of yakuza, only for this to immediately go south when they argue and the leader of the yakuza is killed, immediately bringing to their concern the forest they have chosen to meet at having rejuvenating properties. They have a woman they have kidnapped, played by Chieko Misaka, in tow, and there will be more goons, and two cops, one not impressed his severed hand was still connected to KSC2-303 by handcuffs, the other a braggart who yet has access to a cannon masquerading a long distance rifle. A big bad, set up in a chambara period prologue, is pulling the strings with intentions to unlock the powers of Hell's 444th gate for himself. Neither helping anyone but this villain is that this forest was where the yakuza were dumping their victims quietly in, leading now to there being undead who still had their firearms on them when buried and attempt to still use them.

Sadly this is where what was a celebratory review, with a sense of humour, has to nose dive into reality. It can sadly be confirmed that said villain is played by Hideo Sakaki, a prolific actor and director after this for film and television, who was arrested for accusations of sexual assault in 2024, part of a series of accusations Shukan Bunshun weekly magazine reported in March 2022 about him coercing actresses in sexual situations under the pretence of helping their careers¹. Sadly lead Tak Sakaguchi is connected to another scandal, all connected to a huge MeToo movement which began in the Japanese cinema industry in the late 2010s, where he was directly connected to allegations connected to Sion Sono. Unfortunately, this is a director I had immense fascination in for films like Love Exposure (2008), Sono having allegations of sexual harassment published by a Shukan Josei PRIME article from April 4th, Tak Sakaguchi apologising for his part in luring a woman to Sono in one incident². Details like this unfortunately make it difficult to engage with any production, worse in this case as this is your two lead actors, but this is sadly what happens with hindsight, a film left stranded in the past in knowledge that those involved can be alleged, or in the case of Hideo Sakaki arrested, for undefendable crimes, squandering artistic creativity in favour of absolutely indefensible actions if proven true. I could not consciously ignore this, even if this leaves a bitter taste to the review from onwards, which is a shame as everything else in context to this film is fun and entertaining, and do deserve their place in the sun as someone originally not a fan of Versus, only with this happy ending having a bitter undercurrent too running side-by-side.

Versus itself, back to the film itself and its virtues, was made with overt interest in international cinema as Ryuhei Kitamura, trained in filmmaking whilst living in Australia, wanted to make the films he liked, not only the older action films from Japan itself which he felt had died out, but also with proud influence from international cinema. This is from action films from the West, martial arts films from other countries, and also the splatter horror of the likes of Peter Jackson's early work like Bad Taste (1987), another homemade low budget breakout hit, to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films. You can see this was a work of love having to deal with what resources they could access - they had a limited time with certain camera equipment at one point, hence why there are abrupt moments of spinning the camera around with close-ups in style - but this was thankfully the case where the crew and cast were committed to the project. This is not surprising considering the individuals involved in this project that would go on to shape a lot of pop culture into the 2000s. Thankfully, there are individuals in this production without accusations published who have contributed a lot to Japanese pop culture, especially its face in international fandoms. Co-writer Yūdai Yamaguchi is among that trend, that the likes of Sushi Typhoon started to lean into, of unconventional genre mash-ups which were more focused for Western audiences, becoming a director in his own right with the likes of Meatball Machine (2005). Composer Nobuhiko Morino, bring some nineties drum n bass to the proceedings, became a frequent collaborator with Yamaguchi and Ryuhei Kitamura. There is also the figure of Yûji Shimomura, the action director, someone who would become a huge name not necessarily in cinema, but in terms of video games, as the director the cinematic and action scenes for the likes of the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta franchises, a figure in that field who brought a level of spectacle into cut scenes and helped pave their cult statuses for memorable sequences as much as the acclaim of their gameplay.

The slightness of the film in plot, a simple tale of someone who wishes to open the door to the realm beyond death, is contrasted by the sense of personality to the film. The influences are seen, between a sword being held in the air like the Highlander films, to a Peter Jackson Brain Dead (1992) era joke of someone having their head punched through, with the camera showing us the shot between the elaborately designed (and impressive) special effect. But the sense of humour and playfulness is the film's, even when making jokes of that era of cinema when the first Matrix film was a huge global hit and this is making jokes about the lead not finding any of the sunglasses he finds being cool enough to wear, or that he needs to steal the leather jacket among other clothes of a dead man who stayed so. Versus arguably has a virtue that, even if tragically marked by the sins of those who made it, so many people were involved, and everyone onscreen, even if they do not even have proper names for the characters, has a personality and can heal with issues of watching the film with hindsight to real life. This can vary from the short yakuza, the runt, who constantly has additional firearms on his person even one piece is stolen, and is going full method in acting like a caffeinated ferret, to the cops, one with the issue his primary hand for punching was taken, and the "Expert" who claims to have trained with the FBI, and learnt to be an expert of woodland tracking living in Yellowstone Park in the USA. A personal favourite of mine in the cast, actor Kenji Matsuda, thankfully got a career in the likes of Kamen Rider series and other tokusatsu work, the flamboyant figure as vivid in his performance as the character's suave dress sense, eventually turning into a literal cat-goblin when characters join the necromancer heavy's side. Even what was something I was not a fan of in my youth, the ongoing joke the lead has to knock the female lead out to keep her safe, is contrasted with hindsight with two women in the cast who get to play as tough as the male cast and take part in the fight scenes. These characters may not have as much screen time as hoped, but they all get a scene to stand out in.

 It is a spectacle film, the logical conclusion to every film fan who wanted to make a film in the woods, where everything is based on what is cool. It is not enough to punch a man's heart out, you need to take a bite from the freshly produced object. Swords can have laser sights regardless of their practical use, and everyone manages to find new armaments regardless of how and where they are stored. Even in terms of an actual plot, it is ambitious to cut to a chambara setting for the back-story, and the ending, which is more of a twist for the sake of it, does feel unpredictable. [Huge Spoilers] Considering how it is built up KSC2-303 is not exactly a true pure hero, but an amoral figure with some virtues, it is built up that one day he could just become an amoral figure in another reincarnation who wants to destroy everything, and the villain was at least moral evil. [Spoilers End] Like a few micro budget films, there was an alternative cut, an Ultimate Cut, where Ryuhei Kitamura wanted to improve aspects with some new footage. There is nothing drastic thankfully barring CGI planets in space in the opening with an emphasis over the lead as more amoral than presumed; instead, this version adds some additional scenes which do not jar explicitly new content, some improvements in the practical effects and just a general tweak in places. It is telling though I am happy, now on the film's wavelength, that I am happy with the original theatrical version as is, even if you do get a blood spurt for a decapitation in the original version that is a mere trickle among moments changed.

It also was a happy conclusion as, whilst sadly spoilt be the horrible tales in real life beyond films, it did lead to Ryuhei Kitamura becoming a director for a Godzilla sequel, and even getting to work in Hollywood, the same journey that Peter Jackson would have. That is enough to place a better opinion on Versus, even without the entertainment I found from this with a fresh perspective, as this was the case of one of these home spun films which became a true calling card, and because of this, I cannot hold anything but a positive bias for this film.

 

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1) Japanese film director arrested over sexual assault allegations, published by Kyodo News on February 21st 2024.

2) Sono Sion Accused of Sexual Harassment, published by Arama Japan in 2023.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

An Abstract Candidate

 

When I first approached Teenager Hooker..., there was no wonder I hated this, as I had a zero taste for micro budget films which went against the norms of genre cinema just in terms of budgetary limitations, let alone their unconventionality. Now I love these films, and Teenager Hooker... is an idiosyncratic production for those who share that similar taste. It has a premise you would expect from Japanese films made with an eye for the West as from Sushi Typhoon in the mid-2000s - a schoolgirl prostitute (So-yun Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a older woman's apartment, the son the schoolgirl's teacher (Dae-tong Kim) who gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin. The twist is that this is a South Korean production just in the cusp of their great cultural wave in terms of Korean cinema getting huge recognition in the West. Director/screenwriter/cinematographer Gee-woong Nam's filmography sadly stops into the mid-2010s, but it delights me that he managed to get a long run from his debut here, include a TV movie, which I will bring up later.

Suffice to say, I was not prepared for what is on the surface a premise I found in a lot of films from this DVD era I got to by the late 2000s and hovered old DVDs from the early half of the decade even a few decades after; this was a time not just of the "Tartan Asian Extreme" era, in reference to the side label the late British film distributor Tartan managed to ride a hugely successful wave on at this time, but the time of the likes of groups like Arts Magic who brought lower budget films, including early V-Cinema era Takashi Miike to our sources, who is a good comparison in terms of the abrupt curveballs this has. Even then, his films were ones I liked back at a time when I hated this one, which turned out to be an eccentric mood piece. The immediate thing to bring up beyond how distinct its soundtrack cuts are, between Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes (a Chemical Brothers remix) to Mozart, is that this is a standard definition digital camera film which looks even more unreal nowadays as the images have become more blurry. Taking a while even to start as a sixty minute film, languidly letting our female lead wander dingy dark streets, you have the harsh lighting of the format that film was shot on, where blue parts of the streets mix with the orange yellow of artificial street lighting that immediately started to win me over rather than put me off as my younger self may have react to.

Visually as a result, this absolutely would have disappointed someone expecting a film Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008) from Japan; while it belongs tentatively in the same camp as this area of eccentric genre films on lower budgets coming from the East Asian countries at the time imported into the West, this is a far and away more confounding one to sit through. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially as that led to why I once hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw, all because the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine, and I went out of my way to see it. Instead of the obviously weird, I ended up witnessing something much more using its idiosyncratic plot and moments of lurid content in very obtuse ways.

The result feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have six minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits as mentioned, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to him "chasing" her with a Cronenbergian phallic gift, and then (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice. The production design here also emphasises Gee-woong Nam was deliberately taking advantage of the eerie nature of his standard definition camera as much as it was a practical choice, as he shots the widow's scene in a darkened room with painstakingly lit candles, multiple candles to the point of having been a nightmare to collect together, as the main source of lighting for the scene. This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, which to this day I cannot decide is a prosthetic or his actual magnificently rubber face, catching the schoolgirl working at his home and waking his grandmother up. This leads to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music.

The film goes along from here with a mix of styles with avant-garde leanings even if by accident, a lo-fi visual I can justify comparing to video art installation work, specifically from an older review I did a long time ago to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting and style if shot in digital. Back then, this was a credible comparison as Viola, an established American video artist, with that project was shooting on eighties video cameras around places Japan and thus (even from my own faded memories) emphasised the artificial urban lighting in certain locations chosen, something you find here as Gee-woong Nam is working around a lot of real locations and the liminal spaces in-between, especially as night where artificial lighting would be needed, between public bathrooms to obscure diners. This is set around a very low budget movie tone that includes the slow pace, emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and interspersed splat sticks prosthetic effects driven content. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly. You can go from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a opera singer, set to a piece from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air after she gets blasted through the stomach by the teacher with a gun.

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography, actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals as an aesthetic in its own right. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it is in the eye of the beholder, and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting, a style as much as the richness of celluloid film or the clearness of high definition in later low budget genre films. Some very striking images start to come to be because of this, such as that incident in the bathroom which is shot in luminous green lighting, almost Vaseline smeared, with the deliberate harshness of the saturated lighting insanely stylish. The more overtly lurid moments, such as intercutting between the teacher and three brothers having their way with the lead, sawing her into pieces, or actress So-yun Lee bravely dealing with nude scenes and/or strapped to machinery built from metal beans and tubing, are contrasted by ones I would expect from video art I have watched, such as intercutting to an actual opera singer never addressed by the cast singing in the scene nearby. These later details now I see are more overtly unconventional choices on purpose.

Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes video art from a variety of decades as mentioned by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look. It almost takes one back, for a moment of unintentional comedy, when I spotted a prominent KFC restaurant out of nowhere in a moody scene over turntable music in real South Korean streets. The music is surprisingly strong as already mentioned, and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier as mentioned, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it. These tonal switches are further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the time though closer to Takashi Miike's, in both how he abruptly undercut these premises with moments of quietness, or that when he did ramp up the absurdity, he was glad to. The crotch gun that ends this film, subverted as a phallic object inside a man's mouth from a woman in this case, is something he could have done in one of his films.

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone one which would catch a lot off. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, but I have come to love this as time has gone on, where you find yourself both with the pacing of a more atmospheric film, but contrasted by your antagonists being a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashing continually with these creative decisions that now win me over. We can only thank an early DVD release by Third Window Pictures in Britain for licensing this - an unsung hero especially for Japanese cinema like Shinya Tsukamoto to Sogo "Gakuryū" Ishii on Blu-Ray - in fully translated English subtitles, as we never got any of the other films from Gee-woong Nam.  As a director, he would continue with these very idiosyncratic titles - Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl (2002) furthers this eye catching title with a premise about a jar the former finds that allows him to turn snails into human beings, whilst Never Belongs to Me (2006) sounds like a premise to a Shinya Tsukamoto or Miike film we sadly never got, of a man who on request of his girlfriend in an act of revenge has his penis replaced with a gun that fires on orgasm to use on those who did them wrong. Whether they were any good or not is entirely not for the place of this review, but if any of them demonstrated the style and idiosyncrasies of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine, that would make them more enticing.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium