Battle of the 38th Parallel: Fiancée Under Fire

It's a testament to the wide range of prolific director Im Kwon-taek's vast cinematic output that you can find his movies at the Korean Film Archive's magnificent archival YouTube channel as well as at the Wu Tang Collection, an online pulp movie aggregator with an incredibly different agenda. A war pic heavy on artillery and light on character development, Battle of the 38th Parallel falls comfortably in the latter's more lurid lineup. Ghastly dubbing and severe editing (that's cut a half-hour from the film) make the pulp appeal here even greater; any dialogue — or monologue, for that matter — comes across as so much filler before the next air raid, the tank invasion, the next tossed grenade, the next sniper shot, the next launched missile. Dead bodies proliferate.

Oh sure there's a plot involving a young woman (Kim Chang-suk) in search of her enlisted boyfriend, a commanding officer for the South ("When you see your fiancee, tell him I died like a soldier") but having crossed enemy lines and made her way to safety, she's not about to rest on her laurels. Once she's received that less-than-romantic letter from her paramour, she's back on the road to shellshocked Seoul to deliver a late serviceman's diary to his anguished family. Strangely, the long journey that made up most of the film is completed in reverse in the blink of an eye. That's what happens sometimes to squeeze in your final message before the end: "We must never allow such a war to occur again!"