Between the Knees: It's Just What You Think It Is

What kind of movie would you guess has accumulated the most views on the Korean Film Archive's YouTube channel? Is it the revered cult film Housemaid? A thrilling classic like Yoo Hyun-Mock's The Aimless Bullet? Something from the new millennium such as the 2000 version of Chunhyang? Of course not. It's Between the Knees, Lee Jang-ho's trashy flick about a classical flautist (Lee Bo-hee) who keeps having flashbacks of the day she was molested by her classical music teacher when she was a little girl. Currently, that traumatic encounter has captured the eyeballs of over 1.4 million viewers who have learned, if they stick it out for this erotic oddity, that whatever is causing this protagonist to have PTSD has also made her knees her primary erogenous zone. Not only does a man's touch to her patella send her into shivers of anticipation but even seeing another woman's leg being stroked and groped on the bus can prove to be sensory overload.

Want to see a flute get a hand job? Or the flute used as a sex toy? Well, you're going to have to bear witness to a series of increasingly upsetting rapes that culminates in a gang bang in the back of a van. As soft porn goes, this one is too dark to arouse any but the most twisted of minds. As you might deduce, Between the Knees is not a tale of sexual awakening so much as it's a metaphorical movie about the corruption of the pure Korean soul by Western culture. For not only is the tutor a truly creepy white man but a younger brother is obsessed with Michael Jackson whose dance moves have so mesmerized the younger sibling that he seems to be lost to the greater tragedies in his family so preoccupied is he with perfecting his moonwalk.