The Fox Family

Year: 2006
Director: Lee Hyung-gon

The Fox Family is the kind of film that you are almost embarrassed to admit publicly that you enjoyed – doing so exposes a soft dim spot in your brain that we generally prefer to keep within the confines of our loved ones or with strangers that we will never see again. But sometimes confession is good for the soul and so I will say it – I thought this film was a hoot – an idiotic one but one that kept me almost constantly entertained. It is everything that the much more hyped Dasepo Naughty Girls should have been – absurdly silly, comically sexy and extravagantly musical. Admittedly, it does play it a bit safe when it comes to actual carnage committed by the protagonists, but this odd family of four most resembles the scary but ultimately kindly The Adams Family – except they are foxes.

Not just your normal everyday fox mind you, but magical ones from the Nam Mountains who want to become human. They have a short period of time in which they are able to appear in human form and if they are able to eat a human liver on a night in the 1,000th year when the moon and the sun meet, they will become human for good and give up immortality. So they drive down from the mountain in a beat up old van and ask the first person they meet where there are lots of people – Seoul he tells them and they are off on their way – but not before a dog is missing with a lovely close-up of the youngest member of the family showing a satiated happy bloody smile. There is nothing like a little dog in between meals to help you nap.

The family consists of a curmudgeonly father (Joo Hyeon), a 20-something son (Ha Jeong-woo) with a fruity bowl haircut, a dour attitude and an inclination for bad disco dancing, a foxy daughter (former Miss Korea Park Si-yeon) who is hot to mate with anything in trousers and can do a sizzling pole dance in a subway car and strip while doing backward flips and a little daughter (Koo Joo-yeon) who raises pets – to eat – and likes to sleep in a suitcase when not jumping over rooftops at night. As a cover they open a circus for kids but when they perform the “saw the girl in half” trick and she comes out without any arms and blood spurting like she is in a Lone Wolf and Cub movie it sends the kids screaming out in terror. They collect four people for their livers but have to keep them alive till just the right time – but these foxes are a little squeamish about killing and the hottie falls in love with one of the victims (Park Joon-gyoo) – after some really good human-fox sex – and as she claims in song “love is sweeter than blood”.

The film never takes itself serious for a second – I mean how could it – and it has some nice special effects, lovable performances, colorful sets and as foxes tend to do it breaks out into colorful musical numbers on occasion. There are a lot of really inventive visual moments in the film and if it had just been willing to push the morbid factor a bit more instead of being perhaps too sentimental and making it safe for children this film would have been really terrific. Still, it was a hoot.

My rating for this film: 7.0

Trailer

Reviewed: 03/07