Holy Night: Demon Hunters: Aerobic Exorcise

"My honey loves his exorcisms," my bofriend says to me. And he's right. I'm an easy one to please when it comes to movies about spirit possession. Which means I'm definitely the target audience for Holy Night: Demon Hunters, a film in which Ma Dong-seok (b.k.a. Don Lee in Hollywood) clobbers Satan's minions with well-aimed punches and his sidekick videographer played earnestly by Lee Da-witt faithfully records the fisticuffs for posterity. The true hero of Lim Dae-hee's directorial debut, however, is the silver-streaked Sharon (Seohyun of KPop sensation Girls Generation) who can instinctively smell out evil and has mastered the tried-and-true rituals for getting those nasty devils to leave their human hosts, without ever damaging her manicure.

Per usual, holy water stings, voice registers drop, youthful faces decompose, and rooms turn ice-cold as Sharon frantically works to get the parasitic spirit to confess its name in order to banish the ghoul back to hell. Also per usual, a loved one -- in this case, the devoted sister (Gyeong Su Jin) of the victim (Jung Ji-so) -- almost foils all these efforts as she battles her own personal biases as a neuroscientist and her naivete as a bewildered sibling. Even the subpar special F/X feel on brand, although simply turning the camera upsidedown is more silly than scary. As a fan of the ridiculous, I have no notes to give. And my boyfriend watched the whole thing with me, suggesting some simple pleasures have a diabolically broad appeal.

Dark Nuns: Should the Spirit Move You

How much are you into exorcism movies? I ask because the level of your enamorment will be in direct proportion to how much you'll like Kwon Hyeok-jae's fright flick Dark Nuns. Do you require possessed heads that spin the full 360 degrees and vomit made of green pea soup per William Friedkin's The Exorcist? Alas, this K-horror movie doesn't go that far. Would you be compensated if your dispellers of demons had roots in shamanism like those in Lee Doo-yong's The Hut? In that case, Dark Nuns will meet you halfway. How about some evil impregnation like in Rosemary's Baby? There's something like that here too. But mostly, Dark Nuns focuses on the anti-Satanic ritual itself which eats up a surprising amount of screen time.

Tied to the bed, we've got the innocent young boy Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) who can execute impressive backbends and speak in a few creepy voices. Working on behalf of benevolent forces, we've got the experienced exorcist, Sister Junia (Song Hye-kyo) and her protegee Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-bin) who get little help from hyper-rational Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook) who's more man of the ward, than man of the cloth. We even have an ambassador from Rome (Thomas L. Frederiksen) who has access to potentially helpful relics. Crucifixes, big plastic canisters of holy water, facial disfigurement, droning prayers, and a determination to learn the evil being's name so he can be cast out testify to Dark Nuns's serious mission. For believers only, perhaps.

The Human Trap: Murder on the Orient Campsite

The conventional trope for horror movies that take place in the woods is to have a handful of young 20-somethings (with no cellphone service) terrorized by a deranged slasher driven by motives rooted in the past. But writer-director Lee Moon-young isn't adhering to the rules with his low-budget fright flick The Human Trap. The crazy guy roaming the woods? Not necessarily the killer. The two couples communing with nature? Neither romantic nor platonic. Oh sure, Ki-young (Kim Dong-ho) has known Jeong-ho (Park Yeon-woo) since the two men were in high school. But that doesn't make them friends. Similarly, Ji-ae (Kang Byeol) may be the boss of Chae-Rim (Kang Seung-hyun). But that doesn't mean these women are pals. To the contrary, the message of The Human Trap is this: Good friends are impossible to find!

You may guess that the camp guide (Song Young-kyu) is the villain. Or Doctor Ma (Moon Won-joo). Or the insane, unshowered guy (Kim Ki-nam) running around the forest and stealing supplies. And you wouldn't be wrong. But you wouldn't be right either. Not totally. Because The Human Trap is more misanthropic than your run-of-the-mill scary movie. Like those tricky Agatha Christie mysteries of yore: Everyone is suspect because everyone is base. The nicest person in The Human Trap isn't the hero. It's the one who survives. You'd be a fool to trust any of them! And watch out for the bear traps.

The Hut: Ferocity, Thy Name Is Woman

Life in the small town of Suri is pretty wretched for the womenfolk at the end of the Chosun dynasty. At least, it is if director Lee Doo-yong's supernatural flick The Hut is to be believed. On the one end, there's rape; on the other, an enforced chastity so maddening that widows are driven to self-flagellate, take hot irons to their flesh, and drive a knife savagely into the nether regions then let the wounds fester. Sex positive, Suri is not. And yet, rather than call for a feminist revolution, all the townspeople are obsessed with that one male heir (Choi Seong-ho) who's been in a coma and may be possessed by a local spirit who's holding a justifiably major grudge.

And so they — ironically — call in a female shaman named (Yu Ji-in) who, in order to perform the necessary exorcism to free the town's heir presumptive, needs to play detective and findout who this infuriated phantom might be. Waving a shaking stick will only take a spirit-purging process so far! So... Is it the late Sam-dol (Won Namkoong), a local halfwit who lived in a ramshackle cabin that once served as a holding place for bodies in transition from this life to the next? Or is it the young woman to whom Sam-dol was pimped out because the family matriarch (Hwang Jung-seun) mistakenly thought her charge was about to die, sexually unfulfilled? Whoever the ghost is has every right to be pissed because they've spent a generation captured in a piece of paper trapped inside a bottle that was sealed inside another airtight vessel and then buried underground.

Exhuma: International Exorcisms

Anyone who believe that just because I've watched all the Omen movies — including the laughable made-for-TV fourquel, the 2024 prequel, and the 2016 series Damien — means I'm a sucker for most movies involving demon possession would be... 100% correct. And so when my boyfriend asked me what Korean movie I wanted to watch next, once Exhuma had been presented as an option, I was deaf to every other candidate, awards be damned. Director-writer Jang Jae-hyun apparently shares my obsession: His 2015 fright flick The Priests concerns two holymen investigate a potential demonic assault; his 2019 follow-up concerns a cult tied to serial murders.

With Exhuma, the horror auteur largely ditches Christianity for homegrown shamanism to great effect. Choi Min-sik plays a geomancer enlisted by a matrilineal shaman (Kim Go-eun) to exorcise a familial spirit who is tormenting his descendants, across the Pacific and across three generations (including the newborn heir). The feng shui of burial gets complicated when these two and their two wingmen (Yoo Hae-jin and Lee Do-hyun) unearth a casket too big for a human and wrapped in barbed wire. What happens next? Hell breaks loose — with a decidedly Japanese pedigree. In short, Korea's efforts to get the Japanese to leave them alone now extends to the spirit world too.

CCTV: Someone's Always Watching

Now that we carry our phones wherever we go and sit at desks topped by computers with built-in cameras, our activities and whereabouts are pretty much monitored from dawn to dusk. Is paranoia inevitable? Or has this technologically invasive element turned us into performers 24/7? Either way, the news crew in CCTV is having a particularly rough go of it this particular day because their on-the-job recordings are being invaded by a murderous spirit, recalling the station's sordid past. Which seems to have little influence since no one is inhibited from committing various distasteful acts within the workplace, supernatural video be damned.

Indebted to The Ring (spooky VHS tapes), The Blair Wood Project (found footage), Poltergeist (soul-swallowing televisions), The Exorcist (demon possession), The Sentinel (whited-out eyes), and Terror Train (New Year's Eve setting), writer-director Kim Hong-ik's low-budget horror flick can come across like a creepy skeleton assembled from random bones. The action — appropriately perhaps — takes place in some in-between era in which staffers work on cell phones and paper notepads with nary a laptop or USB drive in sight. And despite the murders piling up in this newsroom, everyone's hesitant to call the police. No one trusts authority. Not in this building! How can they when there are so many backstabbers around that you're hardly surprised when one character (Kwak Do-won) gets knifed in the eye. The takeaway: Trust no one. Even if they've got the evidence on a cassette. (Which is another way of saying, I didn't buy this movie's late-in-the-game whodunit explanation.)

Seire: Murphy's Law for Babies

In Seire, superstitions aren't necessarily validated but believing in them certainly shapes behavior. The big taboo in Park Kang's horror flick is doing anything unusual or untoward in the first few weeks following your baby's birth. Apparently, going to a funeral or — heaven forbid! — a burial can have disastrous consequences: Every apple you slice in half will be rotten to the core; your infant is going to get a sudden fever; you're going to start committing petty crimes — even stooping so low as to rob a homeless man in the streets. And then there are the nightmares.

Seire isn't exactly frightening but it does disturb. Because you sense that our antihero (Seo Hyun-woo), the young father who disregards the old school houserules of his wife (Shim Eun-woo), treated his last girlfriend (who he got pregnant, too) pretty abominably. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the suffering his infant child undergoes is karmic justice but you don't feel bad that the man's life is going to seed. Seire doesn't make the supernatural feel real, even if the presence of twins does conjure up our sense of natural wonder — especially when they look so alike they have to be played by the same actress, Ryu Sun-young. Instead, it makes a suspected power palpable... which can make for a good movie, too. Can you build your whole film around suppositions, hallucinations, and bad dreams? Based on Seire, I'd say, "If you like."

Project Wolf Hunting: Animated, Terminated

I'm not suggesting that the sadistic criminals aren't way smarter than the bumbling cops in Kim Hongsun's ultra-bloody prisoner-escape movie Project Wolf Hunting. But there are still some steps I would've taken once I'd gained control of the Frontier Titan ship whether I was overthrowing my captors at sea or guarding the extradited passengers from the Philippines to South Korea. No matter which side you're on why wouldn't you...

1. Throw the dead bodies overboard.
2. Keep the doctor nearby to administer first aid as needed.
3. Handcuff the pilot to the steering cabin.
4. Keep someone alive for repairs in the engine room.
5. Retain one form of communication with the outside world.

Then again, why do I bring up such concerns when there's maggot-mouthed supervillain (Choi Gwi-hwa) enters halfway through to turn the smiling sociopath (Seo In-Guk) — whom you thought was the primary nemesis — into an expendable secondary character? Though it doesn't reveal the fact until late in the game, Project Wolf Hunting is a monster movie, an over-the-top fright flick in which the evil mastermind is a ruthless gay sex addict who fatally gags the man giving him a blowjob and the final three survivors are mutants who undergone serious gene therapy. Who's behind it all? A pharmaceutical company called Aeon genetics. It's the type of situation that asks: Can one tough woman (Jung So-Min) actually save the world from another military experiment gone awry? Or were Ridley Scott and James Cameron wrong?

A Public Cemetery of Wol-Ha: House of Horrors

Is Kwon Cheol-hwi the Roger Corman of Busan? Perhaps. I mean, I definitely felt a kinship between the deliciously shlocky A Public Cemetery of Wol-ha and those signature fright flicks of American International Pictures (which was cranking out flimflam films around the same time). Throughout Public Cemetery, you'll find the signature marks of that period's best B-moviemaking: overacting, lurid lighting, convoluted storytelling, a sadistic torture scene, and mustache-twirling villainry. For that last part, director Kwon has brought on Do Kum-Bong as a drug-dealing, murderous wife and the constantly cast Heo Chang-Kang as a slimy doctor who prescribes poisons as readily as cures.

These two amoralists conspire to off the courtesan-turned-mother (Kang Mi-Ae) and later, her infant son. That (late) woman's brother (Hwang Hae) — an old prisonmate of her husband (Park Nou-sik) — senses something is wrong in that household but he makes some wrong assumptions. Who wouldn't? No guest would guess it's a household of killers! Theremin music, skull silhouettes, a reluctantly complicit granny (Jeong Ae-ran), and a ghost who glides... if camp K-horror is your cup of tea then this movie is good to the last drop... of blood. In every which way, it's a scream!

Warning: The actual way they handle the real-life baby on-screen is the scariest part of this movie.

The Divine Fury: Shadowman, Mixed Martial Artist

The ostensible leading man for fright flick The Divine Fury is Park Seo Jun who plays Yong Hoo, a traumatized mixed martial artist who discovers mid-career, he's got a gift at fighting demons. Yong Hoo has a troubled past, however. After he loses his father (Lee Seung-joon) in a car accident caused by a Satanic serpent sectarian, he becomes a metaphorical killing machine in the MMA cages where his rage against the world — and the church — has earned him world champion status. Life's not all big gold belts and sponsorship money for our hero, though. He's an empty shell of a man plagued by mysterious stigmata that often erupt while he sleeps ruining countless top sheets and pillows at the finest hotels.

This malady drives him to seek help first from the medical establishment where doctors acknowledge he has a skin wound but can't fathom its underlying cause. Their stupefication leads him to consult a friend's psychic sister (Jo Eun-hyung) who directs him to follow a cross (quite literally) which leads him to his salvation in the shape of Father Ahn (Ahn Sung-ki). Ahn is a middle-aged exorciser who appears in better shape than his soon-to-be disciple. He's world-weary, tireless, and speaks Italian and Latin as well as Korean. In short, he's cooler than his charge and should've been the lead. Perhaps guided by the wisdom of age, he accepts second billing and celebrates his mentee's preternatural abilities at casting out evil spirits. Will the two be able to defeat the cult leader and disco entrepreneur (Woo Do-hwan) with his self-inflicted wounds, voodoo dolls, and Aquaman jumpsuit? Well, the thing about the Devil is you know he's always capable of making an encore.

The 8th Night: The Week Before

You'd think a movie involving a battle between good and evil would have a series of skirmishes before the big confrontation but Kim Tae-hyung's The 8th Night isn't following that convention. Instead, we're told about a monster (blinded by Buddha, no less) who's hoping he can reunite his black eye and his red eye and thereafter wreak havoc on the universe. The planets have aligned apparently. The keeper of the black eye (I think) knows that some crazy scientist has unearthed the red one and is conducting seriously amoral experiments to reactivate it. Once that's done, that one eye has eight nights to jump from body to body (or socket to socket, to be more accurate) until it reaches its partner-in-crime to inhabit the body of a virgin (Kim Yoo-jeong). What other body would house it?

Not much resistance goes on among the various victims in this journey. Generally speaking, the possessed keeper-of-the-eye cracks their neck, breaks out in a smile, sniffs its prey, then transfers into the new host. Creepy as hell but not much conflict. In this horror flick, the tension comes from knowing that with each "jump," the world is that much closer to Armageddon. I wasn't overly concerned with why the bitter monk (Lee Sung-min) with the axe wasn't hacking at an earlier iteration of the bodysnatching demon anymore than I was with the skeptical police officer (Park Hae-joon) who pooh-poohed the occult theories of his staff. The foolish naivete of the accolyte (Nam Da-reum) definitely made me wonder if this movie would have a happy or sad ending but I was fine with whichever way it went. In short, no spoilers here.

Insane: Burning up the Madhouse

The problem with plot twists at the end of the movie where they show footage of what actually took place at a crucial moment is it throws into question everything that happened beforehand. Must we trust the new scene without question? Are there other scenes that also didn't unfold as previously shown? Throw into the mix that Insane's female lead (Kang Ye-won) was kidnapped to a psych ward where she was tortured by a diabolical doctor (Kim Jong-soo) who harvested his other victims for their black market organs and you realize how slippery the truth is destined to be. Are we really expected to believe that a discredited reporter seeking fame is our most reliable source?

So Insane is insane and inane; Lee Cheol-ha's maddening whodunit Is also a whodunwhat as we struggle to figure out exactly what crimes were committed first then figure out who is responsible for each one. Arson. Murder. Abduction. Torture. Dirty medicine. Shady journalism. Castration. You'd assume with that last one I'd know who the culprit was but I don't feel confident that I do. And I did see who the victim was! But was it a trick castration? Or should we write that grisly crime off like the woman who claimed her uterus was messed up by vaseline? I'll leave solving this puzzle to someone else.

Bluebeard: Who's Killing Who?

I do appreciate a good opening and Lee Soo-youn's Bluebeard starts off strong. Its protagonist is a doctor (Cho Jin-woong) who's quickly established as uncoordinated (head-bumps and pratfalls), unattached (a box of forwarded mail) and unapologetically into mysteries (stacks of books abound). So when his butcher-landlord's dad babbles some creepy comments about body disposal while under anesthesia, this guy is all ears! ("The head is still in the fridge..." Oh really?)

In short, his new job as a temporary colonoscopist has put him in an ideal place to help solve an ongoing serial killer case. Maybe he too wants to write a bestseller. That would explain why, when the cops show up at the clinic, he doesn't share any insights or suspicions about that recently discoverd torso. He's caught between wanting to play Sam Spade and being too afraid to get involved.

Did I mention he's been having vividly bloody nightmares? Or that his primary nurse (Lee Chung-ah) may have a crush on him? Or that his son encourages him to play the lottery? Or that a strange man (Song Young-chang) is stalking him? How about a plot that is all but thrown out the window with a half hour left? My, my, my. Welcome to Gangnam!

Call: Redial at Your Own Risk

I was honestly hoping that this K-horror flick was going to be a Korean remake of The Caller, an American film in which a landline telephone links a contemporary young woman (Park Shin-hye, this time) to another girl (Jun Jong-seo) the same age but in the past. Then, while watching this 2020 Netflix release, I kind of wished it were more of a thriller like The Call, the Halle Berry vehicle about a 911 operator with PTSD issues. But Lee Chung-hyun's Call is definitely indebted more to the former — a supernatural movie about two young women with a disastrous telephonic connection stretching over a decade.

When these two realize that their relationship can alter the future, one major good thing happens followed by one terrible thing after another. Should we be surprised? In what universe does messing with history not lead to disaster? Yet the temptation to make minor adjustments is so great, can any of us really resist? My question became, however, if time isn't linear then is there a way for the person in the future to impact the past of the one in the past? And could the person in the future's present be constantly in flux without impacting their memory like a variation of Groundhog Day? But there are no wedding bells at the end of Call because the butterfly effect sounds a death knoll when it's controlled by a sociopath. Do not pick up. Send directly to messages.

Deja Vu: Flashback to What?

At some point during Ko Kyung-min's frightful fright flick Deja Vu, I stopped trying to figure out what was going on. I stop being worried whether the Elvis impersonator Do-sik (Jo Han-sun) was a multiple personality for real estate developer Choi Hyun-suk (Jung Kyung-ho), whether the camera-blurry-equals-hallucinations experienced by Ji-min (Nam Gyu-ri) were caused by her medication or helped by it, and even whether the missing Je-yi (Jeong Eun-Seong) was a dead deer or a dead girl. Free of those concerns, I wasn't particularly scared by office irregularities like flickering lights or an inexplicably activated copy machine; nor was I especially curious when an apartment's walls were smeared with blood. Who cares if a leading character has recently been knifed or not?! Deja Vu is a horror movie that creates a certain distancing effect that allows you to observe camera angles, sound choices, and plot points disinterestedly. Nothing matters. I suppose there's something terrifying about that.

And now for some questions: Can taking a psychotropic pills simulate symptoms in the fiancee akin to those experienced by the patient? Are all Korean professions tainted by bribes involving fat fistfuls of bills? Does every policeman (Lee Cheon-hee) secretly want to be a vigilante and have unlimited funds that would allow him to rent an extra apartment and trick it out with all sorts of surveillance equipment? Would anyone wearing high heels jump up and down on a hard drive as a way to destroy it? I agree that hit-and-run drivers should be punished but did any of the producers believe that this movie would do that particular cause justice? I'm awaiting some answers here.

The Mimic: Do Not Adopt This Child

What would you do if you chanced upon a lost, bedraggled little girl in the woods outside your new house? How about if it were right after a pair of neighbor kids had a terrifyingly supernatural experience nearby? Would you invite her into your home and unquestioningly welcome her into your open arms as she assumes the name and vocal cadences of your young daughter then drives your senile mother insane? Or would you get her over to the local Children's Services? For reasons that eventually work against her, mom Hee-yeon (Yum Jung-ah) takes the first approach in Huh Jung's creepy ghost story The Mimic. But like us, husband Min-ho (Park Hyuk-kwon) badly wishes she'd take the second option. He knows what it's like to lose a child since the couple lost their own son five years ago at a mall. Wouldn't the smart thing to do be to get this lost young girl (Shin Rin-ah) to the cops so they can track down men missing parents? Or considering the bruises all over her back, one might also get her into some proper foster care? When grandma (Heo Jin) pulls a knife on their unofficial adoptee, is anyone doing anyone else a favor by providing this young orphan a home?

Obviously, I was not consulted. And while I do have some advice for this movie's central couple, I don't know how much of it would have been useful when the tiger spirit emerged in the little girl's birth father, a shaman who'd clearly gone off the deep end, too. If this all sounds amusing, it's actually not. The Mimic is kind of scary. Not keep you up so you can't sleep at night scary. More like, you think you're not that scared but then you end up having a nightmare anyway. That kind of scary. Proceed at your own risk.

Sector 7: The Oiliest Monster in Town

What attributes would you give a scary sea monster? A long, retractable tongue? A pair of backwards elbow-joints? Blood made of oil that can easily catch fire coupled with a gift for scarring instantaneously thereby creating a seal that prevents further blood flow and oil-fueled flames? Yeah, me neither. I'd probably make the beast of Kim Ji-hoon's Sector 7 more agile in the water than on land and maybe give it night vision (and a hypersensitivity to light) since its natural home is many leagues deep in the ocean. That the killer creature is so unoriginal comes as a particular disappointment because its ancestors are so fascinating: aquatic, sharp-toothed fireflies that resemble the offspring of Tinkerbell and a sperm.

The humans aren't more impressive here either. The alpha female crew member nicknamed "bad-ass" (Ha Ji-won) may be tough as nails but she's also inexplicably inept at crawling. Her uncle (Ahn Sung-ki) isn't nearly as cool as you're initially fooled to believe he is and her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Oh Ji-ho) doesn't even merit a proper kiss. Everyone in this movie falls short of your hopes including the short-lived resident geneticist (Cha Ye-reyeon) and the pointlessly crabby ship captain (Park Jeong-hak).

What works in Sector 7 is its pro-ecological message: We shouldn't look at living things strictly as revenue generators; we would do well not to keep drilling the planet full of holes and consider other less-invasive energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. So next time you come across an oil-producing, underwater demon, put it on the endangered species list instead of sticking a fuel hose up its butt.

A Devilish Murder: Cat Drinks Blood, Seeks Revenge

I haven't seen many Lee Yong-min movies but after only two, it already feels safe to say he is one strange director. A Devilish Murder, his mid-'60s, black-and-white ghost story, is a loony mix of spirit possession, sibling rivalry, and Dorian Gray mystery all wrapped up in one delicious package. As you might guess from that last detail, the film does involve a supernatural painting — the Red Portrait [of devoted wife Ae-ja (Do Geum-bong)] done by an artist who assisted in the murder of its subject but then went on to immortalize her in blood. The victim's surviving husband Shi-mak (Lee Ye-chun), who remarried her conniving sister, may be innocent of the crime but he's also criminally passive when it comes to recognizing she'd never commit adultery while his wicked mom would do anything to cover the fact that she herself is sleeping with the family's horny doctor (Nam Kung-won).

Admittedly, A Devilish Murder can get convoluted at times. Does the dead grandma return as a cat or a vampire? Is the maid a force of good or evil? Does midnight happen twice in one night? Furthermore, the one exacting revenge isn't really the spirit of the dead woman so much as it's the shapeshifting cat that drank her blood when she was buried behind a wall. Charmingly dated special effects will remind you of the human-animal bond repeatedly; there's a seduction scene in which the phantom woman has feline paws below the sheets, a fight that finds her injured hand transformed into a claw, and some reveals in a well-placed mirror that shatters defensively. Who the helpful maid remains a mystery but the fun of A Devilish Murder isn't figuring out whodunit so much as keeping up with what the hell is going on.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum: Terror Tourism

The six young fools in Jeong Beom-sik's Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum have decided to explore a cursed and abandoned psychiatric hospital that landed on CNN's Seven Freakiest Places in the World. On their way to the bloodcurdling Room 402, they check out the Director's Office, the Lab, the Shower Room, and the Bathing Room, and the Storage Room where they find such ominous relics as a photo of former inmates, some loose syringe needles, a creepy clown doll, a dead chicken, and a discarded wig. The graffiti too sends a clear message... Get out! Yet none of them pay attention to the signs until too late. Instead, harnessed up with two-way cameras that allow YouTube viewers (a.k.a. us, the audience) to see what they're seeing as well as their reaction shots. The goal? To get to one million viewers. The cost? Oh, maybe their lives.

But just how scary does it get? Is someone playing a trick on someone? Are there vengeful ghosts that have to do with war crimes or mental illness? Is all the footage coming from the participants and the cameras with motion sensors that one of the crew stalled earlier that day? How much does the guy at the control panel in the tent on the hill really know about what's going on? After all, HQ is having issues all its own and that pair of dirty underwear someone tied to a branch doesn't turn out to be then helpful landmark everyone though it would be.

We never get to the truth behind all the mysterious happenings and while we see the YouTube viewership climb well beyond 900 thousand, we never see it hit the goal. Not that it matters — it being this movie and the reality show that it contains.

Killer Butterfly: The Ossified Will to Live

The lepidopterist who kills butterflies for his collection comes across as a creep nowadays. As animals and insects left and right land on the endangered species list, the idea of killing for sport feels especially unforgivable, and likely twisted. So when we see Killer Butterfly's hero, a harmonica-playing student in need of an antidepressant, inject a particularly big insect — that he's just netted — with poison, it's easy to relate to the female bystander who perceives his passion as perverse. Whether we too would offer him a cup of poison in response is another matter. Don't worry he survives. At least physically. Mentally, he may never be the same as his attempts to off himself are repeatedly interrupted by a cackling, Nietzschean bookseller who will not die even after being burned down to his skeletal remains.

When a cold win blows that skeleton to dust, another bag of bones is retrieved then transforms into a beautiful woman who hankers for human liver because she hasn't eaten in 2,000 years. She actually urinates 2,000-year-old pee should you doubt her age. I'm guessing it stinks! But if the first skeleton aggravated our sourpuss student, and the second one aroused him, neither proves a match made in heaven, and he's left to have one final encounter with a bodiless ancient skull.

What lies in store for the confused co-ed in the next half of Kim Ki-young's phantasmagoria? More skulls, more bones, some x-rays, more existential poetry, more deaths... and according to the imperturbable investigating detective, more empty soju bottles, too. Let's raise a glass of orange juice to zany cinema! (You'll understand the fruit drink reference once you watch this movie.)