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Never Belongs to Me movie review he-said-she-said screener!

HE SAID:
Nympho teacher
cyborg schoolgirl hooker
penis gun
gay gangster
tiger man
crippled hands
tiger eat da penis…twice
Love makes you do crazy things.

Never Belongs to Me is quite possibly the weirdest film I will see this year. Far from the pretentious weird of last year’s Another Hole in the Head pick, Id, Never Belongs to Me is more the fun and random weird, the likes popularized by such late night fare as Aqua Teen Hunger Force (incidentally, Kris just got me Season 5 for my birthday. Rock on). In fact, watching the film I thought to myself that the story might be something a person might churn out after being subjected to A Clockwork Orange style regimen of the show day in and day out for all their formative years.

But I should probably provide you with an idea of the story. Gun-tae is a young man who’s fallen for a girl. Not just any girl, mind you, but a cyborg hooker with a metal uterus and sexy moves culled from the Elaine Benes school of dance. His brother, a tiger-man (the result of one of his mother’s inter-species trysts) begins to pester him about possible human offspring, citing Mimi, his former (nympho) schoolteacher as a perfect candidate for insemination. Fast forward a bit and the two have botched a robbery attempt, and Gun-tae has run afoul of the local gangsters for some offense centering about two eggs in one pot, and some projectile noodles. Never mind these were all side affects of attempting to do good by his cyber girl. His hands crippled by the gangster’s uber-violent tortures, he opts for righteous revenge. Hitting up the local specialist for the only logical weapon: a bullet shooting penis gun, he arms himself with a picture of a ballerina (his cheapie viagra), and sets off on a rampage of violence the likes you have never seen before, and probably will never see after. But it doesn’t stop there. The film moves quickly from a revenge film, to a quest for restoration and redemption, to a serial killer sex-flick, and onward towards much much more.

Saying Nam Ki-woong’s (Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine in Daehakroh, Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl) film is crazy doesn’t really do it justice. Never Belongs to Me is gonzo bonkers, hopped up on a bowl of spiked punch, Chinese date-rape plastics, red-bulls and doughnuts. It’s a 200 proof guilty pleasure, a laughter inducing riot of political incorrectness. There are sex comedy moments that put American Pie to shame, gimp setups that would make Quentin Tarantino smile, and action that would make John Woo wet his pants. Case in point, shootouts see Gun-tae furiously masturbating his metallic member in order to spray his foes with lead, all the while staring at a postcard of his pirouetting princess. And then there are the rapid-fire film parodies, which satirize everything from Star Wars and Apocalypse Now to Batman in a matter of seconds. Dialog itself seems lifted from a third generation Hong Kong subtitle translation, with all sorts of uber-rude nonsense being spouted back and forth without the slightest notice of absurdity.

I think that about does it. If you like late-night oddities, you’ll probably dig Never Belongs to Me. The film may not be your classic critic-pleasing festival film, and admittedly, sometimes the film’s rapid fire tonal change-ups don’t always work, but on the whole Never Belongs to Me provides a singular experience you’re not likely to replicate anytime soon. If reading this has made you the slightest bit curious, be sure to check it out.

SHE SAID:
Never Belongs to Me’s stylish, serious intro combines predictible Korean cinematic slickness in slow pans, deadpan dialogue, affecting techno. Spun on a dime, it quickly segued into a comedy.. a “revenge comedy” to be exact. How crazy is that? So it’s silly, surreal and unforgivingly deviant, but there’s a thread of depth that may or may not have just been my imagination. Shards of accidental parental irresponsibility mixed up with tales of incest. A mother proclaims with pseudo warmth “don’t forget to have kids, it’s your most important job” even though every elder is lightyears away from securing a parent-of-the-year award. Church confessions mingle alongside cyborg resurrection (in vinyl gimpwear, no less). Insecure women resign their bodies to prostitution, paid-for or free, stating “men are so lousy and rotten that they think fucking is love”.

But oh, I relay it so easily for you. These scenes are actually highly fragmented, frolicking freely with slapstick and uber arterial splatter, characters and storylines weave in and out and out further to way out there. One example: the supposed orphaned half-breed spawn of a tiger predictably acts like a cat, offering corpses as gifts to his fake newfound family. Indebted to his “brother” after accidentally munching on his severed penis (which he voluntarily replaced with a cyber-shooter which transformed his ejaculate into bullets in order to get even with gangsters), Tigerman presents meat-n-cheese logs as magical distress beacons, codeword “Batman”. And there are like six intersecting storylines just as equally bizarre. Yup, my kind of comedy.

Intriguing camerawork utilizing mirrors, bicycle spokes as scrims, dilapidated tenements with mass webbing of TV antennas and com wires, imparts Never Belongs to Me with a healthy, artsy glow, disguising its eccentricity, making it a sloppy film that doesn’t look sloppy. “WTF” doesn’t nearly describe Never Belongs to Me, but it’s a good start.

SF Independent Film Festival screenings: February 8 & 15, 2008

About the Authors

Chris Nelson and Kris Kobayashi-Nelson are the proud co-founders of dreamlogic.net. The adventurous soulmates occasionally take a break from ghost hunting, spelunking, pranking, programming, munching, and 4-hour bike rides to view some killer flicks.