Sector 7
Sector 7
aka 7 gwanggu aka 7광구
2011
Written by Yun Je-gyun
Directed by Kim Ji-hun
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Okay, team, we’re going to get to the bottom of the question “Does this film have phallic and vaginal symbolisms, or is it just stupid?”
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Sector 7 is so by-the-numbers that if you squint really hard, you’ll learn how to count in Korean! Sector 7 decided that it wanted to take all the goodwill that The Host generated for Korean monster movies and throw it all away into the pit of despair, instead giving us a grab bag of scenes ganked from some of the most famous alien monster films of all time. Each scene is a roulette wheel spin random landing on what film they’re stealing from this time. Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Predator, Leviathan, Lethal Weapon 3, probably other films I just didn’t care enough to remember. Oddly enough, I don’t recall any scene ripped directly from Alien 4. It’s almost as if Alien 4 is so bad no one should copy it…
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Wait, am I a penis or a vagina? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON??
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But enough of what this films steals from, let’s go over what this film is. Sector 7 is Korea’s first 3D film, and was obviously filmed on a soundstage with the outside backgrounds CGIed in, giving it a weird visual nature. That combined with me watching a 2D transfer of the 3D film probably caused it to look less visually stunning than it is supposed to. But since there wasn’t really any iconic cinematography in the first place, it’s no big deal.
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Shoot to kill any and all phallic references!
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We get a prologue that is set in the long distant year of 1985, where a man investigating troubles with an underwater drill at the uncharted Sector 7 finds tiny floating jelly things, then horrible disaster strikes. But that horrible disaster factors nothing at all to the rest of the film, so ignore all that and let’s jump to 2011, where there is still an oil rig in Sector 7 and it is still uncharted despite the 16 years and the freaking oil rig that probably cost millions of dollars to build in the middle of nowhere. That logic continues into the rest of the film, but before that, let’s get to the cast…
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You don’t look like my vagina to me!
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I bet there are phallic references here!
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Ahn Seong-gi, CGI trainwreck, Cha Ye-ryeon, Ha Ji-won, Korea, Oh Ji-ho, Park Jeong-hak, Park Yeong-soo, Women who kick butt
Super Batman & Mazinger V
Super Batman & Mazinger V
aka Super Betaman aka 스타짱가 II 마징가V 슈퍼베타맨
1990
Written and Directed by Yeong-han Kim
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Viewmaster…Attack!
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What if Batman was some goofy Power Rangers kid show. And it sucked. Welcome to the world of Super Batman & Mazinger V! For those of you in the know, South Korea during the 80s and 90s produced a whole slew of copyright violating children’s programming that put the insane in the brain, much of which had tie-in low-quality toys. All of these films are horribly awful, and most of them are unknown in the West, rotting away on Korean VHS tapes. But occasionally some of them get brought out into the light of day, blinking in the sunlight, exposure to the bigger world a new and surreal experience for them. And TarsTarkas.NET tells them how much they suck!
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Coming soon to the next Nolan film!
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This time, Batman has gone all Power Rangers, and is either called Super Batman or Super Betaman (the film and related media cannot make up its mind!) He looks like he should be fighting Krankor and the Neptune Men, but instead fights a space witch and her crappy wolfman army. Besides making a horrific-looking Batman, they also steal wholesale from Mazinger V, an anime you’ve heard of if you’re into giant robot stuff, or will hear of once the new movie comes out in a few years (if you are reading this in the future and the movie already has come out, then read that sentence as past tense, but at least you get to fly hovercars!)
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Hey, Teen Wolf Cosplay Guy, carsurfing was outlawed for a reason!
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Other Korean kiddie programming includes Our Friend, Power 5 (Wurideul-ui chingu pawo 5) – A 1989 Ninja Turtles ripoff, Ddaeng-Chil and Double Light (땡칠이와 쌍라이트) – A 1990 alien invasion film where Yoda and apes show up, Eagle Man (who looks like another Batman clone), Dragonball: Goku Fights, Goku Wins (1990) – A Dragonball feature that follows the plot closer than any official Dragonball movie, and literally dozens more. Some of the films are all live action, some are all animation, and many are mixed in between, with models waved around and goofy alien costumes. The most frustrating part of the little information I’ve been able to find about these films is that they only have been released on decaying vhs tapes and will probably soon wither away into nothingness. The common denominator of many of this films seem to be to sell cheap toys, heck in this film a character carries around the toy of the giant robot! The legality of the toys I am sure is questionable at best.
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Hi, we’re going to go all Star Wars Holiday Special on your ass!
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As the film is in Korean with no subtitles (We don’t need no stinking subtitles!), character names are guesses or descriptions, and the plot is put together from what can be understood from the pictures. As it is a kid’s program, the plot isn’t that complicated, so no worries there. We’ve even found this handy plot synopsis: The witch Rinke rules over the plant Astro with an iron fist. She decides that she needs the super-powered robot, Zangga, to spread her rule to other planets. She learns that Zangga is lying dormant somewhere on Earth and sends her agents, Kats and Kobra, to find and collect him. However, she did not count on the intervention of Betaman and some Earth children who are also looking for Zangga.
That doesn’t help at all! Okay, it sort of has what is happening. Is Kobra the name of the Wolfman? I couldn’t ID any of the actors, but I added some names to the tags just in case. And I hope the mysterious II in the Korean title doesn’t mean there is another Super Batman film out there…because…::shudders::
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Batman poses for photos, thousands die.
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Looks like some lucky family got their family portraits back from JC Penney!
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Batmania, cool robots, giant spiders, Hie-ju Lee, Hyeon-gon Kim, Korea, super heroes, We don't need no stinking subtitles, Yeong-han Kim, Yu-seong Jeon
My Girlfriend Is an Agent
My Girlfriend Is an Agent
aka 7-geup gongmuwon
2009
Directed by Sin Tae-ra
Written by Cheon Seong-il
Kicking it old school TarsTarkas.NET as we go over a Korean romantic comedy, something we haven’t done in over four years. Oddly enough, there hasn’t been a lot of good Korean romantic comedies in the past four years (although there are several from back then we haven’t covered and might get to eventually.) But retro TarsTarkas.NET is where we are right now!
This is a return of the kind of quality we took for granted from Korea for a few years, but then the industry crashed and the flow of great films slowed to a trickle. Still, some great films came out, and we hope that the slow trickle will once again turn into a mighty Mississippi again.
My Girlfriend is an Agent had great use of editing. I specifically enjoyed the use of flashbacks/scene cuts to complement dialogue. I personally find that smart filmmaking, though I know there are people who don’t like it. But screw them, this is my website! There is also some nice splitscreen editing.
The Korean title 7Keup Kongmuwon means literally 7th level civil servant – in South Korea the ranking of public servants starts from 9th (lowest) on down to 1st (highest). Now you are an expert in Korean culture and should go out and eat some kimchi.
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Categories: Good, Movies Tags: Domashchenko Vadym, Elizabeth Sujin Ford, Jang Young-nam, Kang Ji-hwan, Kim Ha-neul, Korea, Romantic Comedy, Ryoo Seung-yong, Sin Tae-ra, Spies, Yoo Seung-mok
The Good, The Bad, and The Weird
The Good, The Bad, and The Weird
aka Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom
2008
Directed by Kim Ji-woon
Written by Kim Ji-woon and Kim Min-suk
The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is the best Korean movie I have seen in years. There was a point a few years ago where Korea was the darling of the cult movie lover’s heart. Korea produced more good films a month than certain places (like Hong Kong at the time) made all year. From about 1998 until 2005, South Korea was supreme as far as Asian film was concerned. Then Korea started to falter. Movies became less good, budgets became smaller, the market became flooded with inferior products from the boom years, and the government let more foreign films into theaters. Other Asian film markets started to climb out of their slumps, and now the whole region is more competitive. Only a few great gems come out of Korea each year now, and this is one of the brightest.
From the title alone, you can guess where much of the influence comes from. The Good, the Bad, and the Weird borrows from Sergio Leone westerns in style and basic character archetypes, moving the setting to 1930′s Manchuria and allowing the influences of the Indiana Jones films. The stylization creates a universe of its own, sucking you in and taking you along for the ride. The action is non-stop, the only pauses are just to set up even bigger and more exciting action sequences.
With a budget of 20 billion won (US $15.43 million) it still lost money even with the year best ticket sales of 6.68 million tickets (at 10,000 won ($7.70) each, that should be 66.9 billion won, so something isn’t adding up even if they lose half the money to the theater owners.) Maybe someone with more knowledge of film costs in South Korea can enlighten me, but until then, we’ll just be confused. Just dub this thing and drop it off at Blockbuster, it will make money in a week. Of course, this assumes this ever shows up in America, as the track record for movies like this is that they disappear for years and everyone who wanted to see it gets it by other means… EDIT: I wrote this several months before it appeared on site, and since then a limited theatrical release was announced.
Read more…
Categories: Good, Movies Tags: Byung-hun Lee, Jung Woo-sung, Kim Ji-woon, Kim Min-suk, Korea, Song Kang-ho, western
D-War
D-War
aka Dragon Wars: D-War
2007
Directed and written by Shim Hyung-rae
D-Wars aka Dragons Wars is the film that was announced years ago and everyone though it was crazy. Writer/director Shim Hyung-rae sounded pretty insane with his talk of an epic Korean movie set in LA with dragons blasting everything, and rumor was this was a giant money pit. But investors were hooked, film was created, and soon a trailer emerged that showed dragons and lizard armies marching around LA while a giant snake thing slithers around. This created instant buzz, but it would be another year before D-War hit theaters. Internet weirdos like myself were salivating at the thought of a big-budgeted extravaganza that would either be incredibly awesome or incredibly terrible. Little did we know that we would be getting both in the same movie! For fifteen glorious minutes D-Wars becomes the best movie ever made. However, those fifteen minutes are stuck in the dead center of some of the crappiest writing, acting, logic, and cinematic efforts of the decade. But that’s a good thing, as it makes this review more interesting.
We got Korean dragons. We got subtitles. We got American second rate actors. Shim Hyung-rae is the man responsible for the remake of the Korean daikaiju film Yonggary which became known as Reptillian. The love for this man of giant lizards trashing cities would seem weird were it not for Japan. Still, the concept for D-Wars sounded pretty far out. It depends heavily on Korean myth as well as some random new things. Yuh Yi Joo, Imoogi, Bochun, Atrox, Buraki, Dawdler, the vocabulary you need to learn for this movie reads like some second rate Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh crap! The amount of plot-related alphabet soup words is above and beyond the norm for a giant monster movie. It is distracting, and leaves the audience confused and angry. I don’t want to be angry when watching a monster movie, I want to see giant lizards f-ing things up!
And boy do things get f-ed up! The level of utter chaos here during the money sequence is beautiful. Shim Hyung-rae manages to take to school a squad of previous genre failures. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla only wishes it had this kind of great monster sequences. For those of you upset over the lack of helicopters vs. dragons the posters for Reign of Fire promised us, despair not, for your cup runneth over in D-Wars! Did you wish that the Gungan army in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was really an army of metal-clad badasses who blow the crap out of innocent villagers? You better start believing in the Blue Fairy because we got there here as well!
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Categories: Movies, Ugly Tags: Aimee Garcia, Amanda Brooks, Billy Gardell, CGI trainwreck, Chris Mulkey, Craig Robinson, dragons, Elizabeth Peña, Jason Behr, Korea, Michael Shamus Wiles, Robert Forster, Shim Hyung-rae
The Host
The Host
aka Gwoemul
2006
Starring
Song Kang-ho as Park Gang-du
Byeon Hie-bong as Park Hie-bong
Park Hae-il as Park Nam-il
Bae Doo-na as Park Nam-ju
Ko Ah-sung as Park Hyun-seo
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
The Host is one of the best monster films to come out in years. End review.
Okay, I’ll continue. I’ll be doing this two-fold. First, a general review up top, and then a full recap of the film after a break with warning, so if you wish to avoid spoilers, you will know when to stop. As the American release has been pushed back again, and based on many other films might never show up in American theaters outside of film festivals, so TarsTarkas.NET is plowing ahead and taking it on ourselves. Take that, terrible American foreign film distributors!
The delightful opening sequence when the monster runs amok is a nice change from the films that spend forever building up and then end up insulting the audience with disappointing action sequences and a creature with no personality. Godzilla from 1998 is a good example, and why that monster is called GINO (Godzilla In Name Only.) As people run around in panic, the sense of chaos is portrayed by the handheld camera shots and the people running for their lives. The monster is not always in view, at times we don’t know where it is, as the scenario would be like to anyone caught in the middle of the action.
With actors who’ve played characters in great Korean treasures such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Memories of Murder (the latter was done by the same director), The Host has collectively some of the best actors in South Korea. The characterization and acting in the film are top notch, another thing missing from many monster films (the too numerous to mention Sci-Fi Channel films would be a major contributor.) Song Kang-ho is Park Gang-du (or Kang-doo or Kang-du, depending on which translation scheme you use) who is a single father working in his dad’s food shop by the Han River. Gang-du had a tough life growing up, and now spends lots of his time sleeping. His professional archery competitor sister Nam-ju is played by Bae Doo-na (or Bae Du-na), one of Korea’s best young actresses. Her hesitation costs her at tournaments. The third sibling is Park Hae-il as Nam-il, a burnt out college graduate who has no job besides crawling into a bottle to forget his unemployment, and is a die hard pessimist. The father of the clan is Park Hie-bong, played by Byeon Hie-bong, who is great as well. Relative newcomer Ko Ah-sung plays the young daughter of Gang-du, Park Hyun-seo, who is trapped in the Creature’s lair.
Read more…
Categories: Bad, Movies Tags: Bae Doo-na, Bong Joon-ho, Byeon Hee-bong, Ko Ah-sung, Korea, Park Hae-il, Song Kang-ho
