Seoul Vibe: Drag Chase

Like a vintage automobile with chrome parts agleaming, the visually flashy, woefully oversized Seoul Vibe is a classic car-centric crime pic ... in need of a tune-up. Netflix's studio heads should've brought in a script mechanic! For what could've been a Fast and Furious fledgling revving to franchise is instead an exhausting filmic flivver. The cast is energetic; their characters, assembly-line likable. But no one is going to last beyond that tired first hour except the most devoted fan of Korean cinema. Wait a stopwatched second! That's me! So what can I tell you? Basically, that Seoul Vibe isn't a total wipeout. Come the final laps, I was unexpectedly caught up in the revenge plot hatched by the petulant crew chief (Yoo Ah-in), his mixtape-making DJ (Go Kyung-pyo), and kid sister (Park Ju-Hyun) — who happens to captain a motorcycle gang.

There's just one thing. I didn't necessarily want them to win. Because the best part of Seoul Vibe isn't one of its cute anti-heroes. It's the vampy villainess. Played by the consistently brilliant Moon So-ri, the icy embezzler known strictly as Mrs. Kang exists on a whole other level. She's driving an entirely different movie. A better one. To default to an '80s vernacular in sync with the movie's fashions and soundtrack, she's totally epic. Rad and bad. Could director Moon Hyun-Sung and scenarist Shin Sua cook up a miniseries for her, all about her nefarious machinations in the '90s. I insist they do! Working title: Bangin' Busan.

A Story of Hong Gil-dong: Steal From the Rich, Give to the Cartoonist

Hong Gil-dong is one of those tried-and-true stories that has been inspiring Korean filmmakers for multiple generations. The 2006 version starring Lee Beom-su, The Righteous Thief, updated the beloved Robin Hood tale to contemporary times via a likeminded descendant of its well-known hero. Twenty years before that, a more traditional North Korean variation served up the fable as a martial-arts crowd-pleaser. Another two decades before that, an animated interpretation recast the legend as a Disneyesque fable. What a difference 40 years make!

Per usual, the earlier incarnation of Hong is 100% about robbing the 2%. But unique to the cartoon are obstacles like a trio of rockabilly skeletons, a fanged bat with a cherry red uvula, and a dragon who flies to xylophone music. The connective narrative tends towards the dramatic while the visuals tend towards the comic. These two worlds meet on occasion but overall, writer-director Kim Hong-joon's A Story of Hong Gil-dong is an oddly-drawn curio, not an overlooked classic. This hour-long manhwa (the name for Korean anime) has primarily archival relevancy; less so, artistic.

A Public Cemetery of Wol-Ha: House of Horrors

Is Kwon Cheol-hwi the Roger Corman of Busan? Perhaps. I mean, I definitely felt a kinship between the deliciously shlocky A Public Cemetery of Wol-ha and those signature fright flicks of American International Pictures (which was cranking out flimflam films around the same time). Throughout Public Cemetery, you'll find the signature marks of that period's best B-moviemaking: overacting, lurid lighting, convoluted storytelling, a sadistic torture scene, and mustache-twirling villainry. For that last part, director Kwon has brought on Do Kum-Bong as a drug-dealing, murderous wife and the constantly cast Heo Chang-Kang as a slimy doctor who prescribes poisons as readily as cures.

These two amoralists conspire to off the courtesan-turned-mother (Kang Mi-Ae) and later, her infant son. That (late) woman's brother (Hwang Hae) — an old prisonmate of her husband (Park Nou-sik) — senses something is wrong in that household but he makes some wrong assumptions. Who wouldn't? No guest would guess it's a household of killers! Theremin music, skull silhouettes, a reluctantly complicit granny (Jeong Ae-ran), and a ghost who glides... if camp K-horror is your cup of tea then this movie is good to the last drop... of blood. In every which way, it's a scream!

Warning: The actual way they handle the real-life baby on-screen is the scariest part of this movie.

Horse-Year Bride: No Rock, No Doris, No Fun

I was never a fan of the Rock Hudson / Doris Day movies which reveled in the sartorially stylish '50s and resisted the carnally swinging '60s. Yet that's what Horse-Year Bride recalls — a out-of-date, sighfully silly sex comedy set in a year astrologically reputed to birth the most strong-willed women. And like its American antecedent, Kim Ki-Duk's feeble farce has a flirtatiousness leading to coitus interuptus more than baby making. There's hormones everywhere from the rockabilly singers lip-syncing English pop to the bedazzled modern dancers shimmying to surf guitar yet, most of the time, no one is getting laid. One reason: According to one particularly prudish newlywed, intercourse during pregnancy can cause a cleft palate in the newborn child.

That's hardly the only piece of nonsense espoused in Kim Ki-duk's 1966 flick as its clownish narrator, a fortune-telling matchmaker of dubious talents, intermittently pops up to tell us things like Napoleon had his hand down the front of his pants because of his family jewels and that any incompatibility in the bedroom might be cured with the right yoga practice. Sound like a stretch? Well, follow this film's prescriptive guidelines at your own peril. Watch this movie against my advice. It's frustration on-screen and off.

Rosy Life: The Bane of Black Pleather Jackets

Where do homeless drifters and runaways go besides to the city streets? In Kim Hong-joon's mid-'90s indie Rosy Life, some of them crash at a sordid comic book store run by Madam (Choi Myeong-gil). As a small business manager, she barely scrounges up a life better than theirs. Profits are slim; prospects, even slimmer; rapes, likely recurrent. Perhaps that's why there's such a dependable market for the pulpy escapist fare crowding her cozy shop's shelves. You can only get drunk so many nights. Same for the Korean Flower Card Game. Same for getting laid. What one really wants is a purpose. Or at least a distr ction that doesn't lead to a hangover, debt or a venereal disease.

Not that anyone in this grim slice-of-life is likely to chase a dream. How do you envision a better life when everywhere you look sucks? And what you're wearing is so damned uncomfortable. For me, one signature component of Rosy Life is its wardrobe which appears to be nearly uniformly made of polyester. Seeing two young women walking through a marketplace or a couple of old guys playing cards in cheap duds made my skin itch. Fast fashion really has made being poor worse sartorially. Is it too much to ask for a fabric to breathe? In this suffocating underworld, apparently yes. And wearing a synthetic-leather bomber-jacket with a black baseball-hat and a pair of army-green painter's-pants usually means trouble (Choi Jae-sung). But is it the worst of it or the least of it?

Yeraishyang: The Student and the Sex Worker

We've all heard the one about the hooker with the heart of gold. Yet how about the whore with blood of gold? She's one of the leads in Jeong Chang-hwa's pleasurable melodrama Yeraishyang. How else to categorize a lady-of-the-night (Moon Jeong-seok) who saves the life of a penniless protester (Shin Sung-il) by donating her alcoholic blood for his needed transfusion? And once you've gone that far for a stranger, why not sacrifice everything else? He needs money? Sell your jewels. He needs a place to stay? Put him up for a while. He wants your love, too? Um. That's when things get complicated.

Because one is always one's dirty past as much as one is one's self-sacrificing present. In this cabaret dancer's case, that means "once a drunk, always a drunk" until she ends up in rehab at the National Psychiatric Hospital. There, she'll suffer the indignities of no makeup, no hairbrush, and an unflattering housecoat as well as the delirium tremens. She'll also emerge a new woman. Not the one who begs her boyfriend to slap her. No, she was always there. I'm talking about the embittered siren committed to revenging her dad after meeting a pipe-smoking old, Chinese man. The third act of this pulpy black-and-white may catch you offguard but it's pretty fun stuff.