The Old Woman With the Knife: Stainless Steel Is Gray

One of the surprises of getting old is that you get hit with ailments for which you hadn't planned. For me, it's been creaky knee joints, acidic reflux, and high cholesterol. For Hornclaw (Lee Hye-yeong), the aging assassin in The Old Woman with the Knife, it's waning endurance, a shaky hand, and slower reflexes. I can do stretches, eat dinner earlier, and take a nightly dose of Atorvastatin. She's going to have to perservere with her grueling physical regimen and find a kind, widowed veterinarian (Nam Myung-ryul) to stitch her up should "accidents" occur. Gone are those days in which her younger self (Shin Si-ah) could singlehandedly take out 28 men with a knife. Now she's having to resort to guns and a Spiderman-style rope to eliminate a gang of enemies who lack her timetested expertise.

And so, the illusion continues. We can do anything we used to be able to do, if we try a little harder. In fact, we can even adopt a stray dog named Braveheart and forge new allegiances with the "pest control" agency's office manager Cho-yeop (Ok Ja-yeon) who's modeled her look after Bettie Page, if we're inclined as well. But we'll also have to confront our messy past. (Career choices do make a difference!) In Hornclaw's case, that means facing off with Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a bloodthirsty sadist who wants to unseat their shared agency's current queen. You see, many years ago, he had a nanny who... Oh, check out Min Kyu-dong's fun action pic and find out.

Memento Mori: Creepy Girls Rule the Schoolyard

Whatever the Korean equivalent of the sibilant "s" is, the characters in Memento Mori are lisping it repeatedly throughout the second fright flick of the Whispering Corridors series. This homoerotic creep-show is like a lesbian hall of mirrors. Watch as the central tragic romance between femme psycho diarist Hyo-shin (Park Yeh-jin) and cold-hearted jock Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) is reflected in the obsessive eyes of Min-ah (Kim Gyu-ri), a fellow student who falls for Shi-eun then is possessed by the spirit of Hyo-shin. Try to ignore the Sapphic undercurrents in the friendship among Min-ah's sexually repressed gal pals. Pretend that the heterosexual fling between teacher Mr. Goh (Baek Jong-hak) and Hyo-shin is anything but perverted. Frankly, this movie is gay in the best way possible.

It's also stylishly executed. Spirit-world POVs show a world robbed of subtlety and detail; well-choreographed crowd scenes are shot from above a la Busby Berkley; even the artwork in the collage-filled diary — which Hyo-shin keeps and Min-ah devours — is lovely to look at. (The film snagged a cinematography award at Slamdance for a reason.)

Art house accomplishments aside, Memento Mori freaks because Kim Gyu-ri's such a fidgety, tormented, slack-jawed mess. You'll be torn between finding her acting horrendous and completely appropriate. How would you act if you'd found a magic journal with a secret transformation pill, an envelope of powdered poison, and a hidden mirror that led to your soul being snatched away by the memoirist. Of course, you'd be a total wreck. I suspect the movie's two writer-directors — Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong — were constantly giving their little leading lady conflicting instructions/feedback to keep her perpetually disoriented. Nicely done!

The other movies in the Whispering Corridor series are Blood Pledge, Voice, Wishing Stairs, and the titular film that gives the series its name.

Five Senses of Eros: Speak No Hot Sex, See No Hot Sex, Hear No Hot Sex

Memorable short films? I don't know many. Memorable short erotic films? I don't know any. The enervating anthology Five Senses of Eros didn't change that fact either, especially since there's actually not an arousingly erotic short in the bunch. The opener, Byun Hyuk's "His Concern," is a grating voiceover accompanied by images charting the first stage of a romance resulting from a chance encounter at a train station. (She's way too good for him even if he is played by matinee idol Jang Hyuk.) Number two -- Hur Jin-ho's "I'm Here" -- isn't much better: a twee 20 minutes of a husband (Kim Kang-woo) and wife (Cha Su-yeon) playing hide-and-seek even after she ends up dying of something or other. (This woman likes to spoon even when she's gone!)

On to the third mini movie "33rd Man" which gets more pornographic by kicking off with a naked humping couple undone once the ghost (Kim Gyu-ri) appears. She's not really a spook, mind you, she's simply an actress on a shoot with a frustrated director (Kim Su-ro) and an experienced leading lady (Bae Chong-ok) who oddly enough happens to be a bisexual vampiress. By film four, things get weirder and dykier. With Min Kyu-dong's "The End and the Beginning," now we've got a bitter, horny widow (Eom Jeong-hwa) who decides to shack up with the magician-girlfriend (Kim Hyo-jin) who her hunky husband (Hwang Jeong-min) was banging when he got killed in a car accident. (Just wait until she finds those S&M videotapes.)

Last and least erotic if most interesting is Oh Ki-hwan's "Believe in the Moment," a fragmentary little flick about six incredibly edible young things who confusedly swap partners as they struggle to find out the meaning of intimacy. Lots of kissing! No nudity! I've actually seen previous films by many of the writer-directors featured herein but I don't feel that any of them qualify as an auteur just yet. This project probably appealed to them as something to do before they got to work on a more serious project. Maybe they're auditioning actors. Maybe they're testing out cinematographers. Maybe they're trying to flesh out an idea about carnal desire or the eros-thanatos connection or a dream they once had but don't remember too clearly anymore. Maybe that's it. But only maybe.

Antique Bakery: Cooking up a Sweet Little Mystery

I haven't received many Korean movies recommendations for my blog. In fact, I've received just one: Antique Bakery from a reader named The Purple Girl. Well, I wish more people would share their favorites because Min Kyu-dong's film is a highly enjoyable bonbon, a sweetly fruity comedy about the friendship that evolves between a gay patissier (Kim Jae-wook) with "demonic powers of attraction" and a bakery owner (Ju Ji-hun) struggling with repressed memories of being kidnapped by a serial killer. If that set-up sounds more twisted than twee, take into account that the movie is based on Fumi Yoshinaga's popular manga. Because of its source, snappy irreverence holds sway over psychological derangement; the comic book colorfulness informs everything from the song-and-dance fantasies to the secondary characters like a retired boxer who finds a second life as a baker (Yu Ah-in) and a bodyguard (Choi Ji-ho) whose devotion to his boss extends to serving him hot cocoa in bed. While romance flirts between all four leading men, the only serious man-on-man action comes when the pastry chef re-encounters his mentor (Andy Gillet), a lovely Frenchman with the biggest non-Asian role that I've ever seen in a Korean movie. It's all pretty delicious!