I Saw the Devil

By Senor Woo

Revenge, a dish best served cold…and Korean. At least in Kim Jee-Woon’s 2010 ultra violent flick I SAW THE DEVIL. What happens when a psychotic serial killer rapes, murders, and dismembers your pregnant fiancé? You take two weeks off work of being a secret agent and you track down and make the sick fuck pay, that’s what!

I SAW THE DEVIL is a pretty straight forward revenge movie with enough blood and gore to impress even the most jaded gore hound. After the brutal murder of his fiancé, a secret agent becomes hell bent on revenge. He relies on his training and eventually tracks the killer down. Does he instantly shoot him dead and piss on his corpse? Hell no, he delivers a hellacious beating and knocks him unconscious.  He then plants a tracking devise in the killers’ stomach so he can track and hear his every move.  After a while, the killer feels comfortable enough to get back at raping and murdering some young girls. Just when he is about to get all rapey on his newest victim, our hero shows up to ruin the fun, not to mention completely slicing through his Achillies tendon. It’s definitely a cringe-inducing scene. Once the killer gets privy to the tracking device, he downs a bunch of laxatives to shit his brains, and the device out. There is a nice little scene of him digging through his own shit. He then turns the tables on the agent by going after the people he has left to care about, his fiancés dad and sister. The old man takes a beating like a champ. The killer repeatedly smashes in his eye socket with a ten-pound dumbbell. I guess he is going to have a hard time SEEING the devil now! Zing!! The sister is also beaten beyond recognition and is presumably raped as well; this sends the agent or the edge even further. This cat and mouse game goes on for a while, until the brutal finale of some of the most extreme revenge pay off I have ever seen.

The best thing about this movie is that it’s not just gore and violence for the sake of gore and violence, it is amazingly acted and the storyline keeps you glued to the TV. But honestly, the gore and violence is what drew me to it. When it was first released in South Korea, it had to be drastically censored to even make it to the theatres and not get instantly banned. Good thing we got the unrated cut here on Blu Ray. Clocking in at over two hours long, the red stuff is flowing! All of the violence is brutally realistic and not over the top i.e. a lot of Japanese horror (think MEATBALL MACHINE.) A lot of heads get bashed in with pipes and hammers, a decapitation, we see a screwdriver slammed through someone’s cheeks, and lucky guy gets his jaw ripped into a “permanent Smile.”  Most of the rapes are implied so it’s pretty tame in that department. Like I mentioned earlier, the ending is very satisfying and creative. How do you torture a man that can’t feel emotion or pain? Our secret agent figures it out and it’s fucking great!! I SAW THE DEVIL is a must see movie. It’s definitely not for beginners, but if you are reading this review, you sure as shit can handle it.

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore: 5 out of 5, super violent, super realistic 

Rape: 0 out of 0

Animal Death: 0 out of 0, I didn't even see a live animal in this movie

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0.

Torture: 5 out of 5, the best part about revenge movies is the torture and payoff. Good stuff here!

Overall Movie: 5 out of 5, I can't recommend this movie enough, it has everything. EVERYTHING!! 
 

The Butcher

By Jimmy Squarejaw

When you have Mr. Kim Jong-il living just to the north of you, you would think that might make people of South Korea a little edgy.  I would also like to assume having idiots go up to the Armistice Line to float balloons with Gideon Bibles tied to them over to North Korea would also put the regular people on edge.  Y’know one thing I’ve learned over time is the best way to deal with your resentment for assholes in and around your country is to make exploitation films focusing on completely insane violence and torture.  And that friends is how we arrive at the South Korean pseudo-snuff film, THE BUTCHER.

THE BUTCHER begins in the midst of a kidnapping situation.  Four people are tied up in a corner room of an abandoned chicken farm and are not too thrilled about the heavy cameras taped to the tops of their heads-amongst other unpleasantries.  The movie from here on out rotates between seeing footage from the cameras the captors have and the cameras the captives have taped to their heads.  We get to know the personalities to two of the captors as they mill around anxiously, taunting the captives and exchanging a few common complaints of the job while they wait for “the director.” They have gripes similar to county employees in the United States, “it’s too hot and we need a fan” and “this building smells like shit and we need a new one.”  The Director finally arrives and quickly hops to it, which is great because this movie was starting to lag ass!

The captives get names assigned to them based from their social merit and place in the Director’s film.  Evidently these guys are writers for the idiotic show, Big Bang Theory, because they came up with the clever topical monikers, Fat Fuck, Skin and Bones, and the husband and wife team who they call “hey asshole” and “whore.”  If I had a dollar every time I wanted to call husband and wife teams Hey Asshole and Whore while walking around Best Buy I’d have $24!  As the Director and his assistant starts to prep the captured folks, the husband gets free and runs like hell out of the room screaming…..and by screaming I mean wailing like he was giving birth to a WWF wrestler out of his asshole sideways. Naturally the evil captors get him and drag him into view of “Fat Fuck” about to be brutally murdered by a gigantic Korean in a pig mask and butcher’s apron.  This scene serves as a precursor to the carnage that comes at the hand of a plagiarized South Korean version of Leather Face mixed with the pig mask wearing Farmer Vincent from MOTEL HELL.

The married couple gets brought into the kill room, which could also double as a set for one of the stuff your fat fuckin’ mouth shows on the Food Network.  Everything is covered in thick plastic, there are two chairs facing each other and there is gore and blood everywhere.  Take a clue Guy Fieri!  So the Director starts taunting the husband and does the classic flip a coin to determine if you die quickly gag. The result is if the husband can handle ten minutes at the hand of Pig Headed Korean, both he and his wife can be set free.  Out of all the movies I’ve seen with this similar situation I really thought this time the husband would make it.  Just seemed reasonable.  But no, the husband pusses out and begs Pig Man to stop.  The Director gives the weeping husband one more chance to get free; if he thinks of a creative way for his wife to be killed the Director would let the husband go.  Just like all the classic love stories the husband goes, “fuck yes I want to save my own life and not my bitch wife’s,” and the husband starts lobbing out ideas finally settling with cut her guts out and feed them to her to then remove the bite sized morsel from her open stomach to re-feed her.  The nightmare ensues and the fate of the couple will have to be found out when you watch THE BUTCHER.

The grim atmosphere to THE BUTCHER was the best part of this movie.  It takes place in a dilapidated chicken farm that looks like where 90% of the heroin influenced songs of the mid-90’s were probably written.  The filmmakers did a great job creating a feeling of isolation and hopelessness by showing not one of the evil captors cared when everyone is screaming and chainsaws are blazing. I figure this chicken farm was probably in the middle of nowhere or somewhere that doesn’t mind the noise of people being dismantled.  There isn’t any silver lining or redeeming quality to the film either being reminiscent to FLOWERS OF FLESH & BLOOD in that there is no plot other than people being tortured but the realism of FOF&B is lost on some dramatic dialog and the presence of the Pig Headed Killer in THE BUTCHER.  The only glimpse to any details to the killer’s identity or background is a phone call with one of the Director’s associates in the beginning of the movie where he talks to his Mom about her misplacing her bible somewhere. N’yuk n’yuk n’yuk.  I didn’t think anything was necessarily clever, there are no real plot twists and the main “star” to the snuff film, the Pig Headed Killer, is a blatant rip off as I previously stated.  It was worth a watch, but that’s about it.  To be fair, I'm sure the impact of this movie is lost on someone from America who has seen a lot of this kind of crap though.

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Realistic Gore: 3 out of 5, not a lot of gore surprisingly but a few fun little scene.

Rape: 0 out of 0, it was threatened but never delivered.

Animal Death: 0 out of 0

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0

Torture: 4 out of 5, torture is the main focus of the flick.

Overall Movie: 3 out of 5, worth a watch but not groundbreaking by any means.