Beasts Clawing at Straws: Survival of the Wicked

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." So quipped Oscar Wilde. And while Wilde clearly didn't have Beasts Clawing at Straws in mind, the 100-something-year-old epigram definitely applies to Kim Yong-hoon's enjoyable thriller. Which says a lot because there are so many bad guys vying for that Gucci bag of cash. Many are psychos: the madam (Jeon Do-yeon), the guilt-ridden lover (Jung Ga-ram), the loanshark (Jeong Man-sik). Others are more like infuriating foils: the foul-mouthed grandma (Youn Yuh-jung) and the jerky manager (Heo Dong-won). Some are just complicated: the indebted call-girl (Shin Hyeon-bin) and the shady customs official (Jung Woo-sung). The only good people seem to be the naive janitor (Bae Sung-woo) and his cleaningwoman wife (Jin Kyung).

If this sounds like a lot of characters, you're not wrong. And they're hardly the only memorable ones. For instance, there's also a cannibal hitman (Bae Jin-woong) who never speaks, and a dim-witted best friend (Park Ji-hwan) who you may quickly write-off as doomed. Yet despite the huge cast, Beasts Clawing at Straws is never confusing or confounding. To his credit, Kim has crafted an intricately plotted crime pic in which your alliances are constanty changing and in a weird way, justice kind of prevails. Granted, in a very twisted manner. Side note: One of the production companies credited at the top is called Artsploitation and Beasts Clawing at Straws more than lives up to that description.

Woman of Fire: Kim Ki-Young Recycles Himself

With Woman of Fire (1971), you get a justifiably strong déjà vu feeling as psychosexual auteur Kim Ki-young revisits the exact same territory that he charted so memorably in his landmark movie The Housemaid (1961). But there's something new going on here too as Kim is also laying the groundwork for much of his wildly phantasmagorical work of the 1970s, freaky films like Insect Woman (1972), Promise of the Flesh (1975), and Killer Butterfly (1978). Sure, we're back to a housemaid (Youn Yuh-jung) who gets wrapped up in a perverse love triangle with a composer (Won Namkoong) and his wife (Jeon Gye-hyeon) but we're also getting a glimpse of things to come as Kim would go on to explore the eternally demented battle of the sexes with quite a few variations.

None of it's subtle in Woman of Fire. This country girl who becomes a domestic definitely has a screw loose — perhaps caused by being sexually attacked before heading to the city. The tendency of a few characters to laugh maniacally creates a feeling that the world, and not just a few outcasts, have gone certifiably insane. You might be frustrated or delighted by how much Woman of Fire has in common with The Housemaid. As for me, I experienced both reactions. Ultimately, this over-the-top melodrama might be the quintessence of Kim: the look, the vibe, the excesses, the creepy score, the tawdry tale. Which doesn't make it his best. It simply means that it's not the worst.

Awards: For her turn as the deranged servant who ends up ruling the roost, Youn Yuh-jung won top honors as Best Actress at Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival.

Insect Woman: Off With Whose Head?

Hungry for something truly bizarre? Then here's a movie that definitely out-weirds such cult classics as Hera Purple and Terror Taxi, two fellow films that had at least one bloody foot in the horror genre. This particular bit of craziness is called Insect Woman and comes from the warped mind of Kim Ki-young, a director whom I only knew from The Housemaid. On this particularly occasion, he definitely starts off with a bang. What we learn in short order: A married man (Won Namkoong) is checking into an insane asylum where patients, with impotence issues, will double as doctors. And teary-eyed kleptomaniac student (Youn Yuh-jung) is going to be pushed into prostitution after her father dies without leaving her family a financial legacy. They're brought together for a relatively long-term extramarital affair by two nasty lady pimps — all while a lounge version of "My Cherie Amour" plays in the background. From here, it only gets stranger.

The ensuing oddities are both large and small. At the more extreme end, we've got a vampire baby who feeds on the blood of living rats. At the subtler end, we have an irritable son committed to a diet of honey to avoid eating anything that's ever been alive. Snarling lips. Broken plates. Slapped faces. Mexican chicken. Spilled milk. Then there's the calculating wife who dopes her husband so she can subject him to a vasectomy. This movie has serious balls! Whether the shadowy figure in the refrigerator or the aphrodisiac gumdrops on the coffee table get your rocks off depends on how turned on you get by freaky for freaky's sake. I found it very stimulating.

Awards: Insect Woman won best director and best actor honors at the Baeksang Arts Awards for 1973.