Tomb of the River: Paid in Blood

This movie has too much stabbing for my taste. There's also plenty of — somehow more acceptable — men wielding pipes but these secondary gangfights always build to a stabbing so the pipe-brawls feel like they're basically teasers for what's yet to come. As to who's killing whom in Yoon Young-bin's jopok joint Tomb of the River, I don't know if it matters. Everyone's playing king of the hill here: power-grabbing Min-seok (Jang Hyuk), slow-witted if loyal Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong), eternal second banana Cheong-seop (Lee Hyun-kyun), traitorous Mu-Sang (Kim Joon-bae), and the archetypal godfather (Park Jeong-hak) because where would a movie like this be without him. Most of these thugs are going to take one to the heart (via multiple stabs, regardless of rank). Interestingly, the best standoff ends up being a fistfight between two secondary henchmen. Kapow!

After the majority of ToTR's riffraff gets offed, the central conflict looks as though it might shift from gang versus gang versus gang to dirty businessman versus dirty cop. No such luck. The primary detective (Park Sung-Geun) has verbal swagger but can't walk the talk. A sleazy businessman (Song Young-kyu) enters the game late and leaves early. Stab, stab, stab. The body count is high. The final face-off takes place between exactly whom you'd expect: two well-dressed hoodlums. The underlying question turns out not to be whether the good bad guy or the bad guy is going to come out on top. It's whether there's really any difference when you're building Asia's biggest casino right before the next Olympics.

Sector 7: The Oiliest Monster in Town

What attributes would you give a scary sea monster? A long, retractable tongue? A pair of backwards elbow-joints? Blood made of oil that can easily catch fire coupled with a gift for scarring instantaneously thereby creating a seal that prevents further blood flow and oil-fueled flames? Yeah, me neither. I'd probably make the beast of Kim Ji-hoon's Sector 7 more agile in the water than on land and maybe give it night vision (and a hypersensitivity to light) since its natural home is many leagues deep in the ocean. That the killer creature is so unoriginal comes as a particular disappointment because its ancestors are so fascinating: aquatic, sharp-toothed fireflies that resemble the offspring of Tinkerbell and a sperm.

The humans aren't more impressive here either. The alpha female crew member nicknamed "bad-ass" (Ha Ji-won) may be tough as nails but she's also inexplicably inept at crawling. Her uncle (Ahn Sung-ki) isn't nearly as cool as you're initially fooled to believe he is and her motorcycle-riding boyfriend (Oh Ji-ho) doesn't even merit a proper kiss. Everyone in this movie falls short of your hopes including the short-lived resident geneticist (Cha Ye-reyeon) and the pointlessly crabby ship captain (Park Jeong-hak).

What works in Sector 7 is its pro-ecological message: We shouldn't look at living things strictly as revenue generators; we would do well not to keep drilling the planet full of holes and consider other less-invasive energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. So next time you come across an oil-producing, underwater demon, put it on the endangered species list instead of sticking a fuel hose up its butt.

Bedevilled: Friendship Is a Bloody Mess

I suppose, you could call Bedevilled a horror movie since in its bloodiest, climactic section, you do find a crazed yet determined woman killing just about everyone in sight. But the real horrors in Jang Chul-soo's gritty little gem aren't the murders -- which in truth are disturbingly satisfying -- but the abuse suffered by the film's ingratiating protagonist, a good-natured naif named Bok-nam (Seo Yeong-hie) who's become a kind of pathetic joke to neighbors and family. Her husband (Park Jeong-hak) beats her. Her mother-in-law (Baek Soo-ryeon) ridicules her. The town aunties belittle her without mercy. As you see her abused by nearly every person on the remote island on which she lives, you can't wait 'til they in turn get their comeuppance. Which they do in chilling fashion.

But what makes Bedeviled such a great pic isn't its story of righteous vengeance but a sub-plot of devotion and betrayal involving Hae-won (Ji Seong-won), a childhood friend who escaped from the island and who has returned as a completely self-absorbed, big city sophisticate. It's Hae-won we meet first, not Bok-nam, and in a weird way Bedevilled is her story of transformation, too as a truly discomforting tension exists between these two women, a tension extending beyond their suppressed lesbian attraction to the much more commonplace push-and-pull that happens when a needful friend is desperately searching for help while the self-sufficient one is committed to not getting involved. Hae-won's self-justified detachment becomes both Bok-nam's undoing and her liberation. With no one to turn to and overcome by relentless misery, she lashes out and thereby turns Bedevilled into a kind of feel-bad chick flick in which the dangers of not subscribing to the sisterhood are revealed in gory detail. Whether you're an old lady championing the patriarchy or an old friend who can't be bothered, Bok-nam has no sympathy for you. Like any respectable fright flick, Bedevilled is ultimately a political allegory, in this case a cautionary feminist tale that encourages the manicured hand to reach out to the rough-skinned one with dirt under the nails. Hear the message as you scream.