Teenage Hooker Became Killing
Machine
Director: Nam Gee-woong
Year: 2000
Rating: 6.5
Country: Korea
Nearly a perverse tone poem that dreamily
immerses itself in glorious music and distorted saturated colors primarily
of garish greens and yellows. But it is just two degrees away from insanity.
This Korean film has the look of Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels at times but
the lurid imagination of Lynch at his most off-beat and playful. It feels
like a low budget experimental student film who just wanted to make a film
and make it look cool with morsels of black humor sprinkled in. It is needless
to say weird, absurd, pretentious and yet parts of it were wonderful and
hypnotic. And sick. It declares it's desire to break the rules by having
the music receive the opening credits and it's a great playlist from Cesaria
Evora to Sun Ra to Saint-Saens to Mozart to Massive Attack. I would like
to get the soundtrack. The operatic parts play especially well with a body
being sawed to pieces.
A young girl (Lee So-yun) is wandering the
nighttime nightmare streets in her school uniform. Empty streets and lonely
alleyways. She is looking for business. The kind found in quiet dark places.
A man chases her and catches her and they find a doorway to squeeze into
for their ten-minute affair. But her teacher comes along, sees her and gives
a lecture on morality. He looks like an escapee from the Island of Dr. Moreau.
Then she offers him a special and they are bicycling and laughing through
the streets till they find a location to lie down. She tells him all the
other teachers have to pay, but for you it is free. I want a baby. So naturally,
he hires three men to kill her and cut her up. Teenage Hooker is mincemeat.
But a doctor literally stitches her back together with a sewing machine and
programs her to be a killer for the government ala Nikita. In fact, they
have the same basic restaurant scene - kill those two men and escape through
a window in the bathroom. But then she gets other ideas. Revenge. Totally
ludicrous. Avant-Gard meets psychosis.
That is about it, but it is bathed in these
luscious LSD laden colors and angles and close-ups that sucked me in like
a bug to a light. It is all style and not a bit of plot or character worth
a nickel - who needs that stuff - when you have a girl with a gun and a desire
to kill. The director is Nam Gee-woong who has gone on to very little - but
one of the films is titled Chow Yun-fat Meets Brownie Girl. Might be interesting.
All his very few films get terrible ratings on IMDB and if you were expecting
a conventional prostitute revenge film, you would be very disappointed. 60
minutes.
