Archive for July, 2013

Kim Soo-yong was born September 23, 1929 in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province. Almost immediately after graduating from what is now known as Seoul Sabeom University, he joined the army as an English translator and later transfered to the film division of the army’s PR Department. In 1955 he made a dozen films for the army. By 1957, Kim was out of the army and began work in the film industry, debuting with his own film in 1958. In the 1970s, Kim directed no less than 33 films. Some of these I had previously uploaded information about, here are images of the films I had not yest posted. To view the rest of the movies of this director, or others from the 70s, just click the tab at the top of this page marked ‘The 1970s.” Click the thumbnails to view a larger image.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This will be the final entry that I have for REVENGE WEEK and I wanted to save the best for last. Yesterday’s theme of having a hitherto unknown family member exacting revenge on a victim touches a little on today’s theme of a stranger in the house.

Home and hearth hold a special place in our hearts. A home is supposed to be a refuge from the work, stress, confusion and peril of the outside world. However, that does not mean that one can stay in isolation within the house. Friends, family and possibly repairmen come and go and domestic staff may need to be hired to handle excessive work around larger homes. These maids or butlers move among and around the family members, always present but outside. Korean films, especially from the sixties and seventies, often contain a maid, a cook or a driver. A week could be spent on the housemaids themselves because they come in such a variety of styles—the comic country bumpkin, the saucy loving type and the sultry seductress. There are also the innocents who fall in love with the family’s eldest son, those mortally in fear of losing their jobs because they are supporting their entire families, and the vengeance-filled lunatics.

Of course, for Revenge Week, I will be looking at one in that final category from the 1960s. She appears in a Kim Ki-duk (I) film from 1966 called The Black Design Scarf. When her child is killed in a hit and run accident, this woman played by Kim Ji-mi, does a little research and finds the owner of the car. She learns that this wealthy driver is having an affair that she does not wish her husband to know about, hence the reason for speeding. The grieving mother steels her nerves and hides her raw emotions beneath an increasingly cold exterior and manages to get herself hired as a housemaid in the rich woman’s home. The goal she has set for herself is nothing less than killing the murderer’s child.

For a long time she watches and waits for the perfect opportunity but after several missed chances, she realizes that she does not wish to become a killer herself. Breaking down, she confesses everything to her employer and forgives her. The wealthy woman surprisingly does not fire her on the spot but guilt-ridden over her own crime, she kills herself, leaving her child to be raised by the housemaid.
Unfortunately, this movie is lost, existing only as scenarios, advertisements and images so I cannot provide more details…

Wait a minute.. forgiveness? Redemption? Those are not part of a revenge film, are they? Well, yes they are. At any point, in any revenge film, these elements are an option but depending on the genre, we don’t often expect to see them. In the case of Black Design Scarf, the film is a melodrama—and starring Kim Ji-mi, so we could expect a lot of crying. Other films containing revenge-crazed housemaids may be horror or thrillers and thus we can expect a different end.

For housemaid madness, you can’t beat the original. Here is a recently-made trailer for the 1960 classic The Housemaid. C’mon Myoung-ja, you crazy nicotine fiend, show us how revenge is done right!

Finally, I would like to thank Modern Korean Cinema for opening up Revenge Week and for Pierce Conran for inviting me to take part. I look forward to any other events MKC may consider hosting!

Kim Soo-hyeong was born in Paju, Gyeonggi Province on March 26, 1945. From a very early age, he was encouraged to become a movie director by his father. Kim’s father was a influential member of the police department and with his help, Kim could make his dreams reality. After graduating from Geongook University in the Korean Literature Department, Kim Soo-hyeong started to work on the staff of various directors including Kim Soo-yong, Choi Ha-won and Lee Seong-goo. He debuted as a film director in the early 1970s and continued through the mid-90s. The majority of his films from the 1970s are shown below. To view images from the rest–and to view posters or advertisments from other directors from this period, click the tab marked ‘The 1970s’ at the top of this page.

, , , , , , , ,

You can also click on the thumbails to enlarge the plates!

Incest as a tool of revenge must surely be one of the most shocking methods of achieving vengeance. The role it played in the most popular of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy shocked audiences around the world with both its venom and its creativity. The more recent Dirty Blood features a young woman intent on getting revenge on her father and begins a sexual relationship with him without him knowing her real identity. Are these cases unique in Korean cinema? The answer, of course, is ‘No.’

Back in 1971, we have another example of a young woman out for revenge against her biological father. The movie this occurred in is called I’m Your Daughter and it was directed by Jo Moon-jin and it had some big-named stars in it. The incomparable Moon Hee played Baek Yeon-hee opposite Shin Yeong-gyun who played Mr. Baek and Shin Seong-il who played her former lover, Seong-ho. Two other major actresses of the time, Ko Eun-ah and Hwang Jeong-soon also appear in the film.

In the story, Yeon-hee lives in poverty. Her mother bore her out of wedlock when she had an affair with Mr. Baek and never recovered after he abandoned her. After her death, Yeon-hee turns to her boyfriend, Seong-ho for comfort and becomes pregnant with his child. Seong-ho attempts to do the right thing and marry her, but cannot oppose his family who object to the marriage because of Yeon-hee’s background. Instead, Seong-ho is married off to Mr. Baek’s legitimate daughter, Ja-myeong and Yeon-hee is left to fend for herself and raise her son on her own.

To support herself, Yeon-hee becomes a hostess—entertaining men at a bar. She moves closer to Seong-ho’s house so her son can get to know Seong-ho a little. It is there that she is presented with a chance to avenge her mother, and Yeon-hee hatches a dreadful plot. The womanizing Mr. Baek frequents the bar in which Yeon-hee works. Throwing all morals to the wind, Yeon-he gradually becomes closer to him, seducing him and allowing Baek to fall in love with her. When sh is ready, Yeon-hee finally reveals who she is, taunting him with the information and blaming him for her mother’s death and her own ruin. It turns out that Yeon-hee had concocted the ultimate revenge against Baek. Upon learning of his incestuous relationship with his daughter, Baek has a heart attack, keels over and dies. Yeon-hee leaves her son in Seong-ho’s care and leaves for parts unknown.

A decade earlier there were a couple of other films where adult children enter their fathers’ lives without their identities being known, to wreak havoc on his family and business. There is one where a son comes back, gets a job with his father, and attempts to make his stepsister fall in love with him as revenge before having a change of heart and another from 1966 where a young woman gets a job in her father’s office as his personal secretary and feeds confidential papers to rival companies for revenge.

Unfortunately, while these films still exist, a trailer or film clip is not available. So instead, I will leave you with the clip from Who Broke the Red Rose Stem? (1990). A more typical revenge film where a woman sets out to avenge the deaths of her father and husband as well as her daughter’s lost sanity against a cooperate director responsible in his effort to steal the company from her. Five years later she has reinvented herself as a fashion designer and with her model bodyguards enacts revenge on the businessman only to have it revealed that her husband is alive and was manipulated by the evil corporate heads into killing her father. She decides to take her vengeance out on everyone involved, manipulated or not…

Trailer of Revenge 5!

Don’t forget to head over to Modern Korean Cinema for more Revenge Week

It was only a matter of time before I had to touch on the kung fu craze that dominated Korean action films for more than two decades. They are unavoidable when discussing revenge and Korean cinema unless you are limiting the discussion to just recent films. From the mid-60s to the late-80s, literally hundreds of these martial arts action films were created either as co-productions with Hong Kong film companies or as imitations of that popular style. The background of the movie could be different—set in the distant past the film would often be about an evil bandit or warlord and his gang that are terrorizing the countryside and who may have killed the hero’s family. Or it might be set in pre-World War II Asia where the Japanese army is moving gold or supplies through the region and the best friend of the hero’s, more likely than not working for the Independence Army, is killed fighting for a cause that the hero will pick up. Set in modern times, the movie was likely to involve drug trafficking where, once again, the family and/or friend of the hero is killed or the movie would be about two martial arts academies/temples/schools of thought that are rivals and the bad school winds up killing a student or teacher from the good school, so revenge becomes the goal of the day.

In fact, I think it is nearly impossible to separate the element of vengeance from the vast majority of Korean action films from this period. So why not tackle it directly? That is exactly what actor/director Hwang Jeong-ri did in his 1983 creation Canton Viper aka Kwangdong Viper. The story begins typically enough in that the truly despicable villain of the piece, Cheon-soo, is on the loose in the region, killing, raping and stealing wherever he wishes. One of his victims is the mother of young Ma-ryong. Left to his own devices, the child vowed revenge against the murderous Cheon-soo. Ma-ryong spends the next two decades training himself in various forms of combat for the fateful day when he challenges Cheon-soo.

Unlike many similar films, that climatic battle does not occur at the end. Normally in a kung-fu film, if the hero meets the villain early, it results in the hero getting soundly thrashed and nearly killed, sending him back for a montage of recovery and training. Not so in Canton Viper. Ma-ryong defeats and executes the villainous Cheon-soo, but the story does not end there. Instead the focus switches to pre-teen Il-pyeong, the son of Cheon-soo. The boy vows vengeance against whoever it was who killed his father—he is a little unclear on the matter—and sets off into the mountains to find a master of the martial arts to train him in fighting. The mountains are no place for a child on his own, and Il-pyeong barely survives the trek. He is discovered by Ma-ryong and his companion and the pair nurse the boy back to health. Ma-ryong agrees to train the boy in how to fight but it is not long until the child realizes Ma-ryong is the man who killed his father. Ma-ryong decides to spare the boy decades of bitterness and stop the cancerous desire of vengeance before it can take root in the boy’s soul. Giving the boy a trident, Ma-ryong allows himself to be run through, allowing the boy to fulfill the promise he made to his father’s memory and freeing him to grow up with the gnawing thoughts of revenge that had haunted Ma-ryong all his life.

It is an interesting touch that the name of the main character Ma-ryong is generally a villain’s name (Ma literally meaning ‘devil’—Ma-ryong’s name literally means Devil Dragon). I think the point that Hwang wanted to get across is that in another story, Il-pyeong would have been the hero seeking revenge against the man who killed his father, the evilly named Devil Dragon.

I have included two links below. The first is for a website that shows the last two minutes of the film. The second is for the trailer which, to be honest, is not the better of the two things to watch. The trailer consists entirely of fight scenes and they are not the best choreographed that I have seen.

I admit that I have a hard time sitting through this style of action movie… But the ending is really quite good.

The end of Canton Viper (광동살무사 aka Kwangdong Viper)— Only visible if you have a NAVER Id… if you don’t have one, you can view the the scene near the end where Il-pyeong is goaded into stabbing his teacher– just they don’t show the very touching death scene… However, the whole movie is available to view on Youtube, so you can see it that way..

Trailer

Now head over to Modern Korean Cinema and see what other films are being covered for REVENGE WEEK

It is day three at Modern Korean Cinema’s REVENGE WEEK and I continue looking back at forgotten movies of past decades where vengence plays a major role. Today’s film is the awkwardly titled Report of the Daughter-in-Law’s Rice Flower as it is called on the KMDb but also known as Report of Cowwheat (Daum). It is a film from 1989 directed by Ryu Jae-moo and starring Na Yeong-hee. In this film, Soon-yi has tragedy after tragedy heaped on her before she finally snaps and seeks revenge. She started out as a small town girl who becomes pregnant after sleeping with her best friend, Chang-soo. However, he leaves before learning that she is carrying his child. Much later, she goes to Seoul to be with him only to be surprised that he wants nothing to do with her. Distraught, but unwilling to remove Chang-soo from her life, Soon-yi gets a job in her former lover’s company and works under him just so she can be near him. Whether or not her plan to win him back would ever work becomes a moot point when Soon-yi sees the terrible conditions at the workplace and comes to the conclusion that the workers need to unionize. This does not go over well with Chang-soo who arranges for the troublesome Soon-yi to be kidnapped and held in the red-light district to work as a sex slave.

Soon-yi does not take this quietly and she kills one of her captors in an escape attempt. This lands her in jail where her bitterness grows. Eventually released because of the circumstances in the case, Soon-yi goes back to work in the garment factory but she is harassed by the sewing machine repairman. He eventually attempts to kill her at Chang-soo’s request. She kills him first, but realizes that a second murder in self-defense, especially of a man whom she was not getting along with at work, would not be treated as leniently as her first killing. Knowing that she is likely to lose her freedom and all chances that she has at getting revenge for her predictment against the man behind it, Soon-yi goes through with her plan to kill Chang-soo who was on his way to kill her personally. Soon-yi then attempts to flee Seoul but finds she has to shoot her way out as the police are out in force to stop her killing spree. Alas, Soon-yi does not survive to see the credits role.

I might not have considered this film too seriously for REVENGE WEEK except for one major point. There are points in the film where I was strongly reminded of Sympathy For Lady Vengeance. Oh, the reason for vengeance is entirely different and, let’s face it, Soon-yi is no Geum-ja. The latter planned everything down to the smallest detail while Soon-yi just has things happen to her. One of the most obvious ones is Soon-yi’s refusal of the tofu after being released from prison. If you watch any number of Korean films involving crime or gangs, you will have seen someone eating a hunk of bean curd immediately after being released from prison. This is to symbolize a new start– the pure white tofu reprsenting the ex-con’s spirit which has paid for its sin and now has the change to live ‘white’ (pure) as famously said in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance before Geum-ja drops her face in the cake. Soon-yi is having none of that. She is already planning revenge against Chang-soo and no such desire to be innocent of crime exists in her heart at that point.

The ‘Be White’ line in Sympathy For Lady Vengeance is also said here, but in a much longer style. In the trailer below you will hear Soon-yi talking with her daughter at the table and telling her to live with a “Clean heart, body and soul” to which her daughter replies that she will “be clean.” What triggered the connection for me was one small visual. You will see in the trailer a clip where Soon-yi is marching down the street wearing a spotted scarf. I thought to myself, “She looks like Geum-ja with the polka-dot dress” before realizing that there would be several other connections in the film.

Meaningful connection or not, watch Soon-yi as she lashes out against Chang-soo and his friends in the trailer for Report of the Daughter-in-Law’s Rice Flower… (sigh– there is just no way to make that title sound good..)

Report of the Daughter-in-Law’s Rice Flower

BIG GOOD

PLUTO

SUPERFISH- AN ENDLESS ADVENTURE

KONG’S FAMILY

Over the past couple of days, I have been browsing through a huge number of revenge movies and I was left with two observations. The first is that I really needed to making a working definition of what a revenge movie is to better weed through the literally hundreds of possibilities I was looking at. The second observation was that it seemed to me that the majority of films, with the major exception of the imitation Hong Kong kung fu films, the person seeking revenge was, more often than not, a woman.. at least in revenge films made before the year 2000.

To work through the first point, I eliminated all horror films despite the fact that ghosts are generally motivated by a need for revenge. Horror is a completely different genre than what I felt the theme of REVENGE WEEK is about, despite the fact that a ghost’s motivation is almost always revenge. That does not mean that a revenge film has to be realistic. I would consider A Teenage Hooker Becomes KIlling Machine.. as a revenge flick even with its science fiction elements. Also, someone seeking revenge in a movie does not automatically make it a revenge film if the motivation is not all-encompassing. Of course, a character may give up on his or her revenge plot before it is complete, but I would still consider it a revenge movie is it was a major element in the story. I have a good example of that which I am saving for later in the week.

Since most of the films that I will be dealing with this week are about women avenging wrongs wrought by man, I decided that today I would give an example of a man seeking revenge. The image above and the trailer below are from the film I Have Nothing made in 1991. Directed by Im Seon, it is the story of Choi Kang-ta who was raised an orphan by a monk on a lonely island. The monk trains Kang-ta in how to fight, preparing him for a dangerous future. Upon reaching his 24th year, the monk explains the Kang-ta that he pulled his pregnant mother from the sea where she had been thrown by some men wishing to drown her. Unable to save her, he promised to tell Kang-ta her story when he was old enough.

Kang-ta heads to the city to find out more about his background and avenge his mother’s death. Along the way, he earns the respect of several small time swindlers and thugs and winds up putting together his own gang. This brings him to the attention of his mother’s killer, Kang-ta’s own father, who wants to see the young man dead. The older man had married Kang-ta’s mother for position and money as her father is an elderly, wealthy man–with gang ties of his own. Kang-ta’s father throws the power of the gang at his son trying to stop the young fighter from making contact with his grandfather and telling his story.

Click here to view the trailer to I Have Nothing

Now head on over to Modern Korean Cinema and see what other revenge filled flicks they are talking about!

They Shot The Sun (1981)– director: Lee Jang-ho– Starring: Park Il, Lee Yeong-ho, Bang Hee, Lee Kyeong-shil and Kim Gi-beom. Running Time: 100 minutes. Release Date: February 25, 1982.
Looking for a film to write about for REVENGE WEEK over at Modern Korean Cinema, and wanting to review I film I had not seen before, I stumbled across this title and wanted to take a look. As an action/crime movie, there was a chance it could have been revenge-themed but as it turns out, it wasn’t. Of course, I could have saved myself the time by reading the descriptions of the film available online, but then I would have missed out on seeing this exceptionally well-crafted movie.
The story begins with a collage of events– a woman praying in a church, a group of children catching insects in a field, and a drive-by shooting of a woman with an infant followed by a tearful interview of a family whose father was just found shot. These last two events we soon learn are connected. The shooting of the woman was accidental. It was the result of a struggle taking place within the care owned by the two criminals who are the stars of the film, Jong-bae and Do-seok. These two men had just kidnapped a man carrying a company’s payroll. Oblivious of the danger, the man struggled with Do-seok in the back of the car and, in the course of the fight, Do-seok’s gun went off and the woman on the street was shot. A few moments later, Do-seok ends the struggle by shooting the frightened man as well.

Returning home after spending some of their money, the pair shower their families with presents. Both men have two children and a devoted wife. Their interaction with their families reveals more about their characters– Do-seok, now guilt-ridden and determined to leave the life of crime behind, is gentle to his kids and loving to his wife. Jong-bae plays a little rough with his son and his wife is clearly less trusting of her husband although it will be revealed just how deeply she loves him at a later time. Unlike her counterpart at Do-seok’s house, Jong-bae’s wife is instantly suspicious of her husband..even before he returns home. While watching the news, she hears the story of the shooting and the type of crime committed. She immediately goes to the set of drawers in her room and discovers the gun and ammunition kept within are gone. When she confronts her husband with this fact, he spins a quick lie as to why he needed the guns and she allows herself to be convinced..or at least to pretend to be convinced.

She has the right to be suspicious. Jong-bae is an ex-con and that is where he met the Do-seok. The two seem to be a perfect match and act like they have known each other all their lives. However, when Do-seok announces that he wants to turn himself in as a murderer, Jong-bae does not hesitate to beat up his friend in a scene that I noted on a scrap of paper, “Looks like the ending of Rough Cut” — the fight takes place on a mudflat and by the end of the very long fight scene, the two combatants are so covered in mud that they are indistinguishable. In the end, Do-seok agrees not to go to the police, but neither will he join Jong-bae on any more crime sprees.

His resolve however is remarkablely short-lived. In order to make an honest living for himself, Do-seok buys a taxi. But while driving around clients one night, he hears on the car radio about another robbery/shooting of a payroll courier, this time with many witnesses present. He is so distracted by the report that he drives recklessly and causes an accident that lands him in jail. His wife comes to bail him out, but that is the end Do-seok’s attempt at an honest living.

The irony of trying to live right but winding up in prison while having gotten away scott free with murder is not lost on Do-seok and he becomes more brutal in his crimes with Jong-bae than he was before. He stands by, not even looking concerned as Jong-bae chokes an innocent man to death as part of their plot to secure a getaway vehicle for their next crime– the robbing of a bank. The plan this caper as if it were a game, joking, laughing and role-playing their way through the heist, and blindly see it as the perfect crime. However, before they are barely underway, they run into problems–namely car problems. While pretending to repair their car on the side of the road and making plans to steal another from a good samaritan, they have an encounter with a police officer who is immediately suspicious of them. This leads to a shootout and a car chase as the two robbers try to get back to Seoul where it will be easier to hide.After avoiding many roadblocks, the pair make it home, only to discover that the police had thier ID’s and know where they live.

This last part of the film is the most shocking and I will be spoiling it here. However, the movie is not available on DVD (although it really should be) and unless you are living in Korea, you are unlikely to ever come across it. For that reason– and the fact that the movie is thirty years old– I feel no pangs of conscience about revealing the end. If you don’t want to know it, skip the next paragraph.

Do-seok and Jong-bae know the police will come for them. Do-seok removes his wife and eldest son from their home and takes them to a house owned by Jong-bae–much larger than the virtual one-room dwelling the latter lives in with his wife and two children. His youngest child, an infant that does not yet know his father, is left in the care of the housekeeper. Do-seok gives his wife a long note while he leads his son upstairs. By the time she reaches the end of the letter where he explains what he is going to do, it is too late. From upstairs a shot is heard and the terrified woman dashes up the stairs begging her husband not to kill their son. It is too late. Another shot rings out as Do-seok commits suicide. For his part, Jong-bae joins the police in a firefight with his wife and children in the house. Surrounded by more than two dozen cops, plus reporters and onlookers, it looks like Jong-bae is hopelessly outgunned– until his wife picks up a gun as well and joins him in the fight, foregoing the chance to escape. However, the situation is still hopeless and they too decide on suicide to escape capture and disgrace. Jong-bae’s wife begs him to shoot her first as she cannot stand seeing her children killed and Jong-bae proceeds to shoot them one by one before turning the gun on himself. Roll credits.

This has to have been one of the most shocking Korean films I have seen from the ’80s and it was social commentaries. One of the things that I loved was the comparisons of the family dynamics. Jong-bae more violent and wild nature was making his son into the same kind of person which we see while the boy is playing with toy guns. Many children do play with toy guns, but Jong-bae’s son is especially aggressive and gleaful at the imagined bloodshed he is causing. On the other hand, he is shown doing small acts of kindness –such as given money to a homeless man unbidden- and we know there is hope and innocence still in him. The two children of the first shooting victim are also followed by this film for a time, long after they have direct impact on the plot. They are just there to hammer home the relationship and bonds between father and children perhaps to help us understand the later actions of our anti-heroes, though certainly not to condone them.

There are some excellent technical bits to this movie as well as some things that don’t quite work. The use of black-and-white while the two men are planning the bank robbery was a good choice as was making that whole scene almost–but not quite– like an interpretive dance which highlighted the fact that this scene was a fantasy and that their plan in real life was full of holes that only in their daydreams could be avoided. I was not as sold on the brief musical number near the beginning of the film, nor the filtered lens during the sex with the crazy woman on the beach scene. However, both of those scenes got me thinking that the friendship between those two cellmates was very close..and made me wonder just how close the director wanted us to think of them. This was especially the case during the sex scene where Jong-bae spends the entire time watching his non-participant friend on the beach.. the camera focused on Do-seok and moving up and down with Jong-bae’s humping of the crazy, flower-eating woman. However, the film makes nothing more of that so further speculation is useless.

I might be feeling extra-generous today– (I decided to stay home rather than type this in my office and I feel very relaxed..) — but I am giving this film nine out of ten stars. It is an excellent movie that I hope will one day get a wider audience.

Trailers of REVENGE!!
It’s REVENGE WEEK over at Modern Korean Cinema. When I first heard about RW, I initially thought I would track down some older movies with a revenge-themed plot and write about them, and I still may. However, I was sidetracked by another thought. While trying to locate an appropriate film, I stumbled across a trailer for one of the movies I was considering—Janus, Lady of Fire. In this 1987 film directed by Kim Seong-soo, (not the Kim Seong-soo still directing today), Eun-ji arrives early at a cabin where she will be meeting her soon-to-be husband but is gang-raped while waiting for him. Upon recovering, she sets out to seek out her attackers and kills them one by one in creative ways. However, before dying, one of the rapists confesses that they had been hired by her boyfriend so Eun-ji gets herself a gun and sets out to commit one final killing.

More to come this week! Meanwhile head over to MKC and see what other revenge plots they are revealing!