TheRetroCritic

Based on a manga (not an anime, I'm cheating a bit here), Oldboy was the second and, arguably, best part of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy. It cemented Korean cinema in the West as something to really look out for and received a cult status pretty quickly, even spawning an upcoming remake by Spike Lee, starring Josh Brolin. Taking a page out of Alexandre Dumas' classic tale The Count Of Monte Cristo , Oldboy follows an average guy, played by Choi Min-sik, who is inexplicably kidnapped by an unknown enemy and kept locked away in a room for 15 years without any clue as to why he was taken or by whom. Finally, he is released and sets out to find his incarcerator and get his revenge. Along the way, he meets a young girl called Mi-do (a terrific Kang Hye-jung) who befriends him and starts helping him with his disturbing quest. What follows is a truly brutal and unpleasant journey full of teeth-pulling, live octopus eating, head hammering, tongue-cutting and horrible r

From Park Chan-wook, director of the Vengeance Trilogy , comes Thirst , a vampire film that's just as grim and demented as you'd expect. We follow a priest (Song Kang-ho) with an inherent wish to help people. He selflessly signs up for a potentially fatal experiment but something goes wrong (well, more wrong than planned) and although he miraculously comes back to life after dying of whatever disease he was injected with, he soon starts craving human blood as he comes to find that without it, the disease kicks in again and he grows weaker and weaker. Unwilling to kill, he instead starts drinking the blood of a man in a coma directly from a tube going into his arm. So far, so weird. He then meets Tae-ju (the beautiful Kim Ok-bin), a Cinderella-style character who lives with a step-mother and a boyfriend she can't stand. She comes off as just moody and a bit emo until, little by little, we start to realise how nuts she truly is. She starts having an affair with our good