Korean: Hyu meo ni seu teu

Ma Tae-ho (MY WIFE IS A GANGSTER's Ahn Jae-mo; click here for a still) is the layabout son of an affluent retired general (ATTACK THE GAS STATION!'s Park Young-kyu), a staunch Catholic who actually pays Tae-ho to attend church with him every Sunday. His only "friends" (who are more like paid hangers-on and have been since they met as children) are Euglena (ATTACK THE GAS STATION!'s Kang Seong-jin), a sadistic nutcase who lost his testicles when a ravenous wolf attacked him as a child, and Amoeba (THE FOUL KING's Park Sang-myeon), a brain-damaged manchild. While driving under the influence, Tae-ho accidentally kills a traffic cop who was trying to arrest him. Instead of hauling Tae-ho in, the dead man's partner decides to blackmail him for $300 million won (US$244,000). Tae-ho is unable to get the cash out of his father and concocts a plan to kidnap him, with the help of Euglena and Amoeba. Things immediately go awry, resulting in an additional hostage, a mutilated body, and murderous betrayals in the making.

This South Korean black comedy revels in the kind of excess that has become a regular feature of Takashi Miike's work but, ultimately, never approaches the same heights of deranged inventiveness. Co-writer/director Lee Moo-young (who also appears in the movie as a reporter) occasionally finds the right note but the parade of bad taste (a foul-smelling beggar with a rotting, maggot-filled leg, Amoeba drinking "Shit Water" to cure himself after a beating, characters graphically puking, a nun with a hick accent everyone makes fun of, etc) evokes few genuine laughs and the jabs at Korean society are either too obscure for a Western viewer or too obvious for the satire to really work.

SRE/Bear (No Catalog #) (South Korea label) Dolby Digital 5.1 & 2.0 Sync Sound Korean Language Optional English Subtitles 24 Chapters Illustrated in the Menu With Stills Letterboxed (1.70:1) Coded for ALL Regions NTSC Format 100 Minutes Contains brutal violence, brief nudity, mild sexual content, coarse language, and crude content

DVD menu courtesy Bear.

HUMANIST is available at Poker Industries.