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.)