The Eunuch: How Deep Is Your Love?

Poor Ja-ok (Yun Jeong-hie)! The man (Shin Seong-il) she loves has been castrated by her power-hungry father and she's become the number one concubine for the lusty king (Won Namkung). The king, for his part hopes she'll provide him with a male heir to thereby help him usurp his conniving mother, the queen (Yun In-ja) — who's got an active sexlife of her own. For a movie called The Eunuch, Shin Sang-ok's historical drama sure has a lot of genital action, from state-santified rape to MIA erections to exhibitionism and enforced voyeurism.

The head eunuch (Park Nou-sik) knows all the gossip. The medical eununch (Park Sang-ik) spills the tea on the most illicit court behavior in the castle. But this period piece doesn't culminate with savage whispers. Instead, there's mass murder and a battle that reaches its luridly reddest peak when the unexpected hero gets an arrow shot right into his left eye. After all the shafts to the heart, this deadly wound reminds us that love may hurt but weapons kill. That and poisoned drinks served by the bowl. Abortion, you have found your agit-prop movie.

The Hand of Destiny: Under the Covers with an Undercover Agent

Jeong-ae (Yun In-ja) is such a bad girl that she pretends that she's a hooker as a way to cover up her much-worse role in society: She's a North Korean spy! As bad luck would have it, she falls hard for Shin Yeong-cheol (Lee Hyang-ja), a dock-worker/penniless-student who's working his way up the ladder of the South Korean military. Neither knows the other one's secret life outside the tawdry apartment that she's decorated with weird dolls, cheap curtains, and an owl clock that shifts its eyes left and right with every second. As the wise old owl knows, eventually their time of bliss will be over. Tick, tick, tick.

All those booze-fueled flirtations, the shopping sprees that snagged him a nice suit and her a well-dressed piece of arm candy, those sleepovers in which they've inexplicably spent the night fully clothed in a twin-sized bed are about to become troublesome memories. Is it love that kept the other so close or something else? Has she been double-crossing him since day one? Was she actually under constant observation by him night after passionate night? Is the pure love that each continually professes a complete ruse?

This is melodrama built on the idea that when romance unravels, drama heightens. After numerous scenes punctuated by silences that feel either unintentionally modernist or patiently waiting for the actor to say the next line, The Hand of Destiny culminates in two pretty engrossing shootouts on a mountaintop -- one with her hiding just a few feet behind him, the other filmed inside a cave that suggests they, and her bullying secret agent boss (Ju Seon-tae), have been transported to the moon. Indeed, the best cinematography in director Han Hyeong-mo's The Hand of Destiny makes the most of otherworldly shadows and angles so that household objects like a wicker purse or a circular mirror look somehow familiar and strange.

Although historically important for having the first big screen kiss in Korean movie history, The Hand of Destiny's most riveting love scene is actually a death scene, too, in which the femme fatale looks to be experiencing a near-orgasm of death as she begs her former lover to kill her once and for all. As endings go, it's a pretty entertaining one. As an oldie-but-goodie, it's really so-so.