Dark Lady of Kung Fu (Taiwan, 1981)

Some of you may have noticed that, over the past couple of weeks, Tars Tarkas, Durian Dave and myself have all been literally filling the internet to bursting with Pearl Cheung Ling. Could it be that we have something planned? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm perhaps.

Still, the fact is that I wouldn’t be writing about Dark Lady of Kung Fu if not for Tars’ recent positive review of it over at his site. You see, I saw the film quite a while ago and, while I have never officially reviewed it, I haven’t made much of a secret of the fact that I didn’t care for it much, either. I am always game to give a movie I’ve maligned a second chance, however. I’m a cantankerous sort, after all, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that unrelated stressors lead me to spew undeserved rancor upon a defenseless Taiwanese kung fu movie. Hey, it’s better than kicking the dog.

And whatever I might think of it, Dark Lady of Kung Fu is worthy of note for being Pearl’s directorial debut, kicking off a trio of auteur efforts that continued with 1981’s Wolf Devil Woman and 1982’s Matching Escort, both of which are films that I love beyond reason. As with Wolf Devil Woman, she also wrote and produced the film, which, while pretty much putting her in the responsibility seat as far as its perceived flaws and merits, was also a pretty rare position for a woman to inhabit in the world of 1980s martial arts cinema. For that and other reasons, I have, over the course of writing about her career, developed a lot of respect and real affection for Pearl that I felt would surely color my response to DLOKF on the second pass.

Or not. Granted, I did recognize this time around that DLOKF indeed contains pretty much all of the elements that made me love those other films of hers that I’ve mentioned, yet I found the film overall to be a bit of hard work. It starts off promisingly, with Pearl portraying the Butterfly Bandit, a Robin Hood figure in an outlandish winged costume who literally flies and crawls along ceilings in the manner of her namesake. This is accomplished by way of the wild wire work and herky jerk editing of which Pearl is so fond, and it is characteristically charming and delightful. Arrayed against the Butterfly is a, well, array of ham handed officials and competing miscreants whom she mocks with bravado. Among these are a character called the Killer Prince and a testy itinerant swordsman called No Name, who, in his brief time onscreen, delivers one of my all time favorite badly dubbed lines of kung fu movie dialog:

  “Piss off! I told you before: My name is No Name. No is my surname, and my name… is Name!”

However, after all the dazzling dimestore derring-do of its opening, the film introduces us to the Butterfly’s alter ego, a Fagin-like figure leading a quartet of arguably adorable urchins whom she calls “Monkeys” in a life of subsistence level petty crime. Pearl has a tendency to at times play the clown in her self-directed films, but that usually serves to establish an unselfconscious vulnerability that makes the heightened melodrama and tragedy that follows all the more potent. Here the escapades of Pearl and her monkey gang come across as pure shtick, a procession of slapstick interludes, laboriously set up gags and, for lack of a better word, “monkeyshines” that calls to mind the Three Stooges or Our Gang comedies as much as anything else. This may constitute Pearl’s rebellion against all those steely eyed, vengeful swordswoman roles she’d had to play up to that point, but it all goes on for so long that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Pearl doesn’t have much of a story to tell beyond it.

But the fact is that she does, and, as it turns out, it’s a quite crowded and convoluted story that Pearl’s character at times feels somewhat peripheral to. Let’s see: there’s a mysterious swordsman called Shadow who provides a kind of love interest for Pearl, a much coveted necklace called the Blue Rose that gets hidden inside a dead body, something about hermaphroditism, a super weapon being built in secret, plus all of the usual baroque clan rivalries that we’ve come to expect in the mythical martial world -- all of which feel like they’ve been crammed uneasily into the half of the film that remains once all of the aggressive zaniness has subsided. Granted, these various plot elements provide for their share of crazy fights and mind-bending set pieces -- this is a Pearl Cheung Ling film, after all -- but I couldn’t help feeling that they were pretty incoherently presented. At the same time, it is very possible that I was just too ground down by the film’s attempts at comedy by the time they came around to be arsed to sort it all out.

And, to be fair, that comedy is not uniformly unfunny, though how much of that is attributable to a particularly chuckleheaded English dub that christens characters “Laurel”, “Hardy” and “Cool Hand Luke” I can’t say. It also should be said that the movie contains a few examples of Pearl’s trademark loopy surrealism at its finest: When hypnotized by a scheming magician (called “Houdini” in the English version), our heroine appears to either levitate or grow to a towering height, her brightly colored robes elongating around her like an enormous pyramid. Then there’s the stone automaton with a giant pestle that Pearl employs both to prepare meals and to bonk her misbehaving minions on the head, and a recurring visual pun that sees Pearl emerging from her hideout’s various shell-shaped appurtenances.

Alongside these, though, there are also moments where the film’s time and budgetary constraints clearly seem to have let Pearl down, in particular a couple of oft seen and quite obviously hastily constructed sets whose color schemes, even to one with a taste for the hyper-real like myself, are downright headsplitting. I mean, I’m all for contrarian aesthetics and championing the underdog and all, but sometimes ugly is just ugly.

Yet, as noisome and tiring as it may become, Dark Lady of Kung Fu, like Wolf Devil Woman and Matching Escort after it, is nothing if not a testament to Pearl’s eccentricity. Even when she fails, she fails weird. As, true to her name, does she shine. For, despite all my complaints, let it be understood that she never fails here to provide a likeable presence at the center of the Necco wafer colored maelstrom she has created. All of Pearl’s films, after all, give the impression of being on the verge of spinning out of control, so we can at least thank her, in the case Dark Lady of Kung Fu, for giving us a good natured glimpse of what it’s like when one of them goes completely off the goddamn rails.

A Woman After a Killer Butterfly (South Korea, 1978)

While picnicking in the forest with his classmates, college student Young-gul (Kim Chung-chul) takes off in pursuit of a butterfly. After trapping the insect in his net, he then kills it with an injection of poison. A strange woman sitting in the clearing nearby chastises him for the hubris of this act, stating further that a human’s death is every bit as insignificant as that of an insect. Young-gul scoffs at this notion, saying that a human’s death is “much more noble”. The woman then invites him to share a glass of orange juice with her. Afterwards, she confesses that she has come to the forest as part of a suicide pact. As her partner in that pact has failed to show up, she has instead poisoned Youg-gul so that he can accompany her into death.

My last encounter with director Kim Ki-Young was a screening of his 1960 masterpiece The Housemaid, which is widely considered to be one of the most important works in Korean cinema. Suffice it to say that I had a hard job of picking my jaw up off the floor afterward. In that film, Kim matter of factly, and from behind a veneer of tidy formalism, piled on ever more absurdly heightened levels of melodrama and depravity before finally delivering an out-of-left-field climax that could have easily taught Zac Snyder the real meaning of the term “sucker punch”. As you might guess from the above summary of A Woman After a Killer Butterfly’s opening five minutes, the intervening eighteen years seemed to have done little to mellow him out.

The 1970s were a depressed period for Korean cinema, but, thanks to the financial support of his wife, a successful dentist, Kim was able to continue working independently, making the films that he wanted to make with relatively little interference. And what the films he wanted to make looked like, for the most part, were genre films -- albeit genre films that were driven more by Kim’s peculiar sensibilities and obsessions than by any of the tropes one would normally expect. This, combined with his tendency toward rough surrealism, tempts me to compare Kim to Seijun Suzuki, although the ringing endorsement that would amount to on my part makes me feel that I should wait until I take in a few more of his film before (probably inevitably) making it.

As for the hapless Young-gul, he survives his poisoning, although his poisoner dies. And in perhaps an early example of Korean cinema’s long tradition of unlikely police protocols, the detective assigned to the case gives him the woman’s distinctive butterfly pendant as a souvenir. He nonetheless remains depressed and suicidal in the wake of the event and, upon returning home, decides to hang himself. He is interrupted in this by a knock on the door from a scruffy itinerant book seller, who insists that he buy a book about overcoming death through the power of will. The seller says that he has read the book himself and, as a result, cannot be killed. And so, as you would, Young-gul kills him. True to his word, the seller returns to life and continues to hector Young-gul as he decomposes. Even after Young-gul burns his body, the seller briefly returns in skeletal form before finally collapsing into dust.

Young-gul next accompanies a friend to a cave, from which they steal the two thousand year old skeleton of a Silla Dynasty era woman. His friend tells him that if Young-gul does a proper enough job of reassembling the skeleton, it might mean a job for him working as an assistant to the prominent archeologist Professor Lee (Nam Koong Won). And so Young-gul sets to the task, finding that, once assembled, the skeleton gains flesh and returns to life as a beautiful young woman. Having been put under a spell by an ancient shaman in order to avoid an unhappy marriage, the woman informs Young-gul that she must now consume a raw human liver in order to prevent herself from returning to skeletal form. Young-gul frowns upon this and confines her to his apartment. Upon returning, he brings with him a pastry-making machine that he has bought in the hope that it will help them make a little extra money. The two then share a night of passion as the machine noisily belches out pastry shells all over them.

Hold on, I’m not finished…

Unable to bring herself to eat Young-gul’s liver, the woman allows herself to once more become a skeleton, which Young-gul then dutifully delivers to Professor Lee. It turns out that Professor Lee has a daughter, Kyungmi (Kim Ja-ok), who, like all of the women in Killer Butterfly, is icily antagonistic toward Young-gul. It is eventually revealed that she was the erstwhile partner in the suicide pact with the woman from the beginning of the movie, with a matching butterfly pendant to prove it, and that she now also wants Young-gul to take her late partner’s place and accompany her into death. Meanwhile, a mysterious party is sending skulls to Professor Lee that are claimed to be ancient, yet appear to be freshly harvested, with newly severed heads starting to arrive soon thereafter. In a sudden detour into giallo territory, Young-gul sets out to find the culprit and, in the process, witnesses the desecration of a corpse by a man in a butterfly costume.

Now, as much as I abhor lengthy plot synopsis, I think it can be forgiven in this case because… well, first of all, because characterizing what’s described above as such would require an extremely charitable definition of the word “plot”. But also because the manic unpredictability of same is one of the primary factors that makes Killer Butterfly so compellingly, fascinatingly watchable. Rather than weave a story, Kim here catalogues a series of events that steadily escalate in insanity, with the only structure seemingly provided by his obsessively hammering upon themes of gynophobia and the notion of a life force and death urge locked in a constant cycle of mutual derision and belittlement. At the same time, the movie keeps a maddeningly straight face through its stately approach to color and composition, exhibiting a formalism that, I think, speaks to Kim’s time spent in Japan. And then sometimes there’s a pastry machine. The result is a film that lulls the viewer into an expectation of familiar genre elements and then plunges him down a rabbit hole tracing the labyrinthine contours of a singularly fevered imagination.

Believe it or not, there is much of A Woman After a Killer Butterfly that I have refrained from describing, including a denouement that goes every bit as far off the rails as that of The Housemaid. Fortunately, like the previously reviewed -- and just as cumbersomely titled -- Devil! Take the Train to Hell, it is one of a number of films made available in full on YouTube by the Korean Film Archive. Now, I’m not saying that you’ll like it, but I am saying you should check it out. Because, like it or not, I guaranty you’ll never have seen anything quite like it.

Friday's best pop song ever

From the Lucha Diaries Vaults: Karla contra los Jaguars (Mexico/Colombia, 1974)

Karla contra los Jaguares was produced in Colombia, a fact which renders unnecessary the question of what its makers were smoking.

Okay, that was cheap and stupid. And inappropriate. Because Karla contra los Jaguares, for a low budget film starring a team of motorcycle riding luchadores in matching leopard print outfits, is not nearly as cheap and stupid as it could have been. Consider that, on the scale of motorcycle riding team of luchadore movies, it could have been on the level of either of the two Los Campeones Justicieros sequels, and it's very modest charms become a lot easier to appreciate.

Not that the makers of Karla had any more to work with than the producers of the Campeones movies, mind you. It's just that they seem to have made a somewhat greater effort to cover up for their budgetary shortcomings -- and that they show some sense of obligation to their audience to be at least a little bit entertaining, even to provide us with a couple semi-satisfying moments of cut-rate spectacle. The two heist sequences that the film is built around, for instance, are actually handled fairly well. And on the action front, while there is a midget, there are also karate guys and a small army of burly automatons to provide the heroes with some more equally matched physical opposition. Capping off this vaguely engaging display of base level competence is a musical score that provides everything you'd want from a cheesy 70s action movie soundtrack: psych funk arrangements, disco synths and goth metal guitars, all sounding very Italian and probably lifted from some giallo movie or other.

In what is beginning to seem like a kind of minor lucha movie tradition, The Jaguars themselves don't actually get called in to take part in the action until the movie's halfway point, and then with comparatively little ballyhoo. I kind of like how this lack of fanfare makes the whole business seem like routine procedure, as if sending in a team of unarmed masked wrestlers in leopard print briefs is just one of the many tactical options available to the police, and was, for some reason, in this case preferable to sending in the SWAT team. Still, I was left with a lot of questions concerning The Jaguars that I hope will be answered in the film's sequel, Los Jaguares contra el Invasor Misterioso. For instance, do they all share a house, like The Monkees?  We don't even get to see them in a wrestling match, for God's sake. 

As for the top billed Karla, the icy blonde villainess comprises, with her permed and jump-suited boy toy, a sort of pairs skating team of evil. It's not hard to see who's the top in the relationship, especially when the poor guy shows up with a giant sparkly "K" appliquéd on his shirt (some guys would get a tattoo, but whatever), and more especially at the end when she blithely elbows aside his bullet-riddled ass to board a waiting helicopter and make her getaway.

Seeing as it's playing to some markedly lowered expectations here, the only thing I found disappointing about Karla contra los Jaguares is that it contains so little that is truly atrocious. Given that, I had to make do with the architect's model Karla's gang uses to plan a heist involving the hijacking of a skyscraper mounted crane. It's frustrating, because all too frequently people make fun of the models used in B movies by saying they look like they were made by six year olds. But this particular model is made of construction paper and toothpicks, and I'm reasonably certain that it actually was made by a six year old.

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For more reviews of classic Mexican wrestlin’ movies, please visit 4DK’s sister site, The Luchadiaries!

Miraculous Flower (Taiwan, 1981)

Pearl Cheung Ling starts out Miraculous Flower in a role that she had pretty much trademarked by that point in her career: that of the ragged kung fu vagabond. Truly, if Chaplin earned the nickname “The Little Tramp” in silent era Hollywood, Pearl was just as deserving of it in the world of 1980s martial arts cinema. In this case she even has a mournful song, sung by Pearl herself, playing on the soundtrack to underscore her debased condition, lamenting the fact that she is doomed to wander the Earth alone -- with no direction home, one could say, and like a complete unknown, although that would be another song entirely. Of course, as is not uncommon in Pearl’s films, her character will go through a transformation over the course of Miraculous Flower, a sort of blossoming of identity that makes the film’s title that much more apropos.

Miraculous Flower was one of a pair of Pearl’s films that, in video release, were misleadingly titled as sequels to her notorious auteur effort Wolf Devil Woman -- the first being 1982’s Matching Escort, which, despite being made after Miraculous Flower, was rechristened Wolf Devil Woman II, while Miraculous Flower became known in some circles as Wolf Devil Woman III. It must be said, however, that Miraculous Flower differs from both of those films in a couple of important ways -- and that’s putting aside the fact that it’s a standalone film that in no way continues the story of either. First and foremost is the fact that, unlike WDW and Matching Escort, it was not directed by Pearl herself, but by Fong Ho, a director about whom there appears to be little information on the English language Internet. Pearl is, on the other hand, credited with coming up with the film’s story, though the actual script was written by none other than Godfrey “Ninja Terminator” Ho. Secondly, while not free of the oddball fantasy elements that make Pearl’s most well known films so endearing, it is nonetheless a somewhat more sober affair, as well as a somewhat less rough hewn one.

Here Pearl is May, a young girl of apparently humble origins who, in a somewhat daunting opening information dump, is directed by her dying mother to undertake a complex quest that will somehow end in her learning a “big secret” concerning the nature of her origins. May thus sets out, swathed in the classic Pearl Cheung Ling garb of rough cut skins and apparent carpet scraps, on a long journey that takes her across barren, snow swept peaks and lonely expanses of deeply forested woods. Eventually she crosses paths with the dirt-phobic itinerant scholar Lord No-Dust (Tsung Hua), who takes pity on her and brings her back to the opulent home of his father (Wang Hsieh). After May aids in fending off an attack by a vicious rival of the father’s known as Lonely Fly (Peng Kang), the father decides to adopt her, thus leading into Pearl’s first transformation in Miraculous Flower; that from grimy tomboy into, if only briefly, a radiant lady of the manor. Soon thereafter, she stumbles upon the knowledge that No-Dust is leading a double life as a masked avenger called the White Swordsman and, in exchange for her silence, enters into an arrangement with him to train her as a fighter.

Eventually, after learning everything that she can from the young lord, May sets off again on her quest, whereupon she soon meets up with yet another mentor figure, the Happy Fairy, as played by the prolific Chinese actress Gua Ah Leh. True to her name, Happy Fairy imbues May with powers that are somewhat more magical than those taught by No-Dust, with no small amount of extravagant wire work expended toward depicting May soaring this way and that across the landscape as a result. The Fairy also reveals to May the secret of her origins. In brief, it turns out that her true family were casualties of one of those bloody free-for-alls that are all too common in the mythical Martial World, and that the object of that free-for-all, as is so often the case, was a weapon of legendary power, in this instance the appetizingly named “Bowel Cutting Blade”, which it turns out May has had in her possession the whole time. This revelation paves the way for Pearl’s final transformation within the film, into the fearsome, black garbed avenger of the film’s title, who leaves a telltale flower at the site of each of her kills. Unfortunately, May will ultimately find that her kill list contains the names of some whom she has come to love along the way.

If you wanted to see a Pearl Cheung Ling film that was really quite strange, I would recommend Wolf Devil Woman, but if you wanted to see a Pearl Cheung Ling film that was really quite good, I would recommend Miraculous Flower. This is not simply because of the film’s more consistent dramatic tone, but also due to the breathtaking nature of its many fight scenes, which for once provide a decent showcase for Pearl’s physical skills, which actually turn out to be pretty impressive. Noteworthy for their combination of exciting choreography, dazzling wire work, and dynamic shooting technique, these fights also stand out for the spectacular settings in which they play out, taking place everywhere from atop raging waterfalls, to sheer cliff faces, to snowy tundras. And to top it all off, we get a desperate climactic battle that takes place within the fiery bowels of an active volcano.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Wolf Devil Woman and Matching Escort are both films that I deeply love. It’s just that, while those movies inhabit a strange universe all their own, Miraculous Flower is capable of going head to head against more conventional and professionally mounted examples of its genre on their own terms -- while at the same time nonetheless bolstering Pearl’s image as a true eccentric of kung fu cinema. It is Pearl’s status as a weirdo that I cherish above all, but I respect her even more for being a weirdo who was clearly capable of following a more well trod path, yet who chose not to nevertheless. Miraculous Flower is a resounding bitch slap to anyone who might have previously entertained doubts about her skills as a martial artist (perhaps myself most of all -- ouch!), and as such can’t be recommend highly enough.

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For more information about Pearl Cheung Ling, please be sure to check out my esteemed colleague Durian Dave's series of posts about her over at his blog Soft Film, as well as his Tumblr Fuck Yeah, Pearl Chang!

Neang Sak Pus, aka Snake Haired Girl (Cambodia, 197?)

I’d never claim that there weren’t benefits to living in the West, but one way in which we definitely pale in comparison to Asia is in the area of snake-based folklore. Such tales of snake women, snake-like women, and snakes and the women who love them have provided inspiration for colorful fantasy films on the part of film industries everywhere from India to Indonesia to Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, the Khmer language cinema of Cambodia also embraced that subject matter during its brief golden age, with Neang Sak Pus being a solid example of the result. Meanwhile, America continues to wow the world with output like Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid.

Like the previously reviewed Crocodile Man, Neang Sak Pus was the product of Khmer cinema power couple Dy Saveth and Hui Keung, the married actors, producers and sometime directors whose company Sovann Kiry produced numerous popular films in the years leading up to Pol Pot’s takeover. In 1970, the ubiquitous Saveth had starred in the similarly themed Puos Keng Kang, aka The Snake King’s Wife, a movie that went on to massive success throughout Southeast Asia and spawned a string of official and unofficial sequels starring the actress. In the case of Neang Sak Pus, Saveth stars, while Hui Keung directs, although the Chinese subbed print that I watched credits him under his pseudonym Chin Wan.

Neang Sak Pus begins as the tale of two adulterous lovers who engage a sorcerer to do away with their respective spouses. Upon the death of the woman’s wealthy husband, the two are married, only for the woman to find that it is her virtuous sister, Ah-hua (Saveth), whom her lover truly has eyes for. Despite the fact that these attentions are unwanted by Ah-hua, the enraged sister has her servants drag the poor girl to a remote cave and toss her into a snake pit. It turns out, however, that the resident snakes have interests in Ah-hua other than biting her, and that those interests are sexy interests. As a result, Ah-hua later dies in the process of birthing a baby which the snakes then raise to adulthood. And, yes, that does mean that you get to thrill to the sight of an actual human baby surrounded by many actual live snakes, because Asian cinema does not fuck around when it comes to things like that.

Skip forward a few years, and that baby has grown up to be Dy Saveth (again), resplendent in a Flinstones style mini and crop top and a hat that looks like an oversized shower cap. This snake-spawned lass, who will come to be known as Ah-mei, is an untarnished creature of nature, unlearned in the Ways of Man, who swings from vine to vine like Tarzan. And it is in the course of doing just that that she comes to the attention of Lung (Kong Sam Oeun), the handsome son of the very woman who condemned Ah-mei’s mother to that snake pit in the first place. Despite Ah-mei’s inability to express herself in anything other than snake talk, love blossoms between the two -- that is until Lung accidentally knocks off Ah-mei’s hat to reveal, to his horror, that her hair is a mass of living snakes (and, at least in part, real ones, by the looks of it). Eventually, of course, true love wins out over visceral repulsion and the lovers are reunited, though sadly not before Lung’s parents have decided to turn to the black arts in order to drive them apart.

I should note that Dy Saveth’s portrayal of Neang Sak Pus’ titular character -- as a childlike innocent who is, at her worst, only playfully mischievous -- is worlds away from the more typically spine chilling snake ladies we’ve seen personified by the likes of Indonesian horror queen Suzzanna. In fact, for much of its running time, there’s a kind of sweetness to the film’s treatment of the romance between its central couple –- a sort of boy meets snake girl, boy loses snake girl, boy fights to win snake girl back tale. And then, during its final act, Neang Sak Pus takes an abrupt turn into what will probably be rough waters for some viewers, essentially taking us on a grizzly tour of regional folk magic at its most visceral and potentially alienating.

This begins when Lung’s parents, convinced that their son has been possessed against his will, consult with a trio of shaman, who are then shown performing a lengthy ritual that involves them driving long needles through their cheeks and slicing their tongues with daggers. Later, in another ceremony, a live rabbit is beheaded onscreen. It is these types of rituals that were exploited and exoticized in the Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong produced Black Magic films during the 1970s (the popularity of which might explain why Neang Sak Pus received a Mandarin subtitled home video release), though coming to them here, aware of the deeply held belief in black magic that still holds sway throughout much of Southeast Asia, their depiction is leant a matter-of-factness that gives them an even greater power to disturb. It also doesn’t help that none of the mutilations depicted appear to be simulated.

Still, I’m gladdened to spoil that, despite such grueling trials, love triumphs over all at the end of Neang Sak Pus, if then only with the help of an army of vengeful snakes. Evil is smote and the lovers are reunited, convinced by their tribulations to leave the world of humanity behind for good. It’s a blandly satisfying conclusion that anyone can relate to. And, as with Crocodile Man, no small amount of guileless charm has been exhibited in the course of getting us there -- even if that charm, for the uninitiated viewer, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the film’s harsher documentary content. (Though it always behooves the uninitiated viewer to remind him/herself that it’s really not about him/her anyway.) I have to admit, though, that the tension between the two energies gives the film overall something of a welcome charge, like a reminder that magic doesn’t just fuel fairy tales, but nightmares as well.

Friday's best pop song ever

Devil! Take the Train to Hell (South Korea, 1977)

It turns out that YouTube’s lifting of its length restrictions has been one of the greatest boons to world popular cinema fans to come along in a good while, with the only inherent difficulty lying not in finding the gems, but in knowing what gems exist to be found. The latest mother lode comes courtesy of the Korean Film Archive, who recently uploaded a large collection of vintage Korean popular cinema to the site -- with English subtitles, no less -- for our enjoyment and edification. Given the previous unavailability of such films in our part of the world, we Westerners have a lot to learn from them. For instance, from Devil! Take the Train to Hell I learned that -- like movie audiences pretty much everywhere else in the world during the 1970s -- South Koreans had a healthy taste for funky revenge thrillers.

D4TH is one of a handful of films directed by the actor No-Shik Park, a prolific star of action films with a career spanning back to the 1950s. Here Park casts himself as Donghyuk, a blind saxophone player leading a double life as a Korean national living in Japan. Following his gigs at the smoky burlesque club where he works, Donghyuk, using his specially honed skills, determinedly feels his way along the darkened city streets, seeking to mete out revenge against the four former Japanese soldiers who, eighteen years earlier, blinded him and murdered his father. Arriving at the home of one of these men to find that someone has already done his dirty work for him, Donghyuk is reunited with Yeji (Bo-yeong Ahn), a girl from his village who also lost her father in the same incident. As Yeji has clearly assigned herself to the same mission of vengeance as Donghyuk, the two decide to pool their resources and take on the three remaining scoundrels as a team.

Having thus established itself as a film that doesn’t put too high a premium on credibility, D4TH proceeds to place our two protagonists in a series of increasingly outlandish and coincidence dependent scenarios. As Yeji and Donghyuk’s targets have all in the intervening years gone on to become powerful crime figures, breaching the walls of security around them requires some improbable, “Mission Impossible” style escapades on their part. One of these involves the sightless Donghyuk learning to both drive a car and to catch arrows in mid flight. Another involves a box containing poisonous snakes upon which Yeji seems to exert some kind of psychic control. And finally, in order to trap a victim who is an amateur photographer, we have Yeji infiltrating a model shoot dressed as a sexy cowgirl.

Throughout, D4TH distinguishes itself by saturating its oddball thriller trappings in an almost comically heightened level of melodrama. Truly, it’s a wonder that Yeji and Donghyuk ever get around to killing anybody, given all the time they spend crumbling into a collective heap of tears and self recrimination. Donghyuk is perhaps the least stoic disabled person in the history of cinema, never missing an opportunity to go on a self pitying tirade, and furthermore -- for reasons I won’t go into here -- considers himself partially responsible for what happened to Yeji’s father. Yeji, for her part, feels Donghyuk’s pain perhaps a little bit too acutely, and for some reason finds herself unable to tell him once she realizes that she’s fallen in love with him. She does, however, tell us -- in a series of voiceovers that are increasingly utilized to make us privy to the leads’ tortured internal monologues. All of this extravagant hair tearing builds up to an appropriately absurd and bathetic last minute twist that has to be seen to be truly appreciated.

Stylistically, D4TH is a bit bare bones, with the odd, attention grabbing flourish here and there. Park exhibits a shrewd use of slow motion to heighten dramatic scenes, and elsewhere strategically drops the audio out to underscore a character’s subjective isolation. A brief nightclub dance worthy of a Jess Franco film also bears mentioning. But what the film otherwise lacks in aesthetic razzle dazzle it more than makes up for in its loopy conceits. Donghyuk and Yeji clearly live in a world in which the rules of everyday logic that the rest of us have to contend with don’t apply, yet we are nonetheless asked to identify with their tragic humanity. After all, whether you’re a blind jazzman with preternatural martial arts skills or a woman who can inexplicably telepathically command snakes, you’re still not immune to the pain of loss, the depredations of war, or the ravages of personal guilt. As the film’s title seems to suggest, that’s a train ride we’ve all got our tickets punched for.