Review: EXHUMA Digs Up Ghoulish Thrills in Spades

By Pierce Conran

In the smash hit Exhuma, four people dig a hole. Things don't turn out well - digging up corpses can do that - so they keep digging themselves in deeper. Unsurprisingly, things go from bad to worse.

A rich Korean family in LA fly in a pair of young shamans (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) to solve their supernatural woes but when the pair connect the bizarre events to the family’s buried ancestor back in Korea, they return and team up with a grizzled geomancer (Choi Min-sik) and a wily undertaker (Yu Hae-jin) to dig up and burn the corpse and bring the supernatural happenings to an end.

Click to read more»

Busan 2015 Review: COIN LOCKER GIRL Offers New Perspectives on Standard Thrills

Part of MKC's coverage of the 20th Busan International Film Festival.

By Pierce Conran

Against a parking lot bursting with saturated colors, a person lies on the ground, at the mercy of another standing above them who wields a sashimi knife still dripping red from its last kill. Dark, bloody and stylish, this could be the beginning of just about any Korean noir. But Coin Locker Girl is trying something new, as these two characters are played by none other than Kim Hye-su, one of Korea's most glamorous leading ladies, and Kim Go-eun, its latest fresh-faced starlet.

Click to read more»

Coming Attractions: CHINATOWN to Battle In Theaters This April

By Rex Baylon

It seems that almost every trailer I write about ends up being an upcoming thriller or crime picture and this time is no different. Han Jun-hee, screenwriter for the 2013 thriller The Gifted Hands, debuts as director this April with Chinatown, or for people who've been paying attention, Coin Locker Girl. Starring Kim Hye-soo, of The Thieves (2012) fame, and Kim Go-eun, who you might remember from the erotic drama Eungyo (2012), Han's picture seems to be a gangster-cum-family melodrama with Kim Hye-soo playing a stern and powerful Chinatown gang boss and Kim Go-eun as her troubled adopted daughter.

Click to read more»

Review: Tone-deaf MONSTER Exhibits Unusual Cruelty Towards Women

Ingenue Kim Go-eun gets her first top billing in director Hwang In-ho’s uneven and sadistic revenge thriller Monster. Exhibiting the same irreverence towards genre as in his previous film Spellbound (2011) but with none of the panache, Hwang fails to keep things on track with a slow to start narrative, a young star out of her depth and a disturbing streak of misogyny.

Click to read more»

UDINE 2013: A Muse (은교, Eungyo, 2012)

“No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident…A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse... But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom, and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument... The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman...”

-       Robert Graves

Click to read more»