As the latest Twilight fan-fic opens nationwide, it seems only fitting that I finally get around to writing something about a South Korean vampire film I watched a few weeks ago at The Uptown Theatre. Now most people know director Park Chan-wook for his Vengeance trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance) or possibly for his segment from the horror film Three Extremes making him one of the better known foreign language film makers in the US. So when I heard he’d be making a vampire film, I was excited at the possibilities, but I got something I never expected.

Thirst follows the story of a priest who undergoes an experimental treatment, during the course of which a blood transfusion transforms him into a vampire. Soon he discovers that if he doesn’t feed, that his disease will return, thus he must soon abandon his morality in order to survive. But that is scarcely his furthest fall.

You see, our priest has a secret, he’s in love with his friend’s wife. And his hunger isn’t simply for blood, but for other things just as carnal. Thus, our intrepid hero must slowly abandon his faith in order to satiate his growing desires. And that’s when Thirst truly blossoms into a modern masterpiece of film making.

While Thirst is a morality play to be sure, and it is full of horror elements, at its heart it is a romance, though a very twisted and dysfunctional one to be sure. As our priest falls deeper in love with the woman of his desires, he makes a rather foolish step that propels the two of them into an unending struggle for dominance of their lives, their relationship and of their hunger.

Following in the footsteps of last year’s outstanding vampire film Let the Right One In, Thirst creates complex and realistic characters that are thrust into worlds they can scarcely imagine let alone control, try as they might. These are people with faults and flaws, and simply craving the taste of blood won’t change that, but it just might amplify their flaws. Thirst simply isn’t just the best vampire movie of the year, its one of the year’s best movies, period.

Tags: film, Foreign, foreign language, Horror, horror film, lady vengeance, Let the Right One In, movie, Movies, oldboy, Park Chan-wook, South Korea, sympathy for mr vengeance, The Uptown, The Uptown Theatre, Thirst, three extremes, trailer, Twilight, vampire, vampire film, vengeance trilogy

You’d think that I would be a fan of war films, but for whatever reason, I’m not. Of sure I like most modern war films, and I have a soft spot for exploitive films like Commando or Red Dawn, but old school John Wayne/John Ford war films? They just don’t interest me in the slightest.

To be fair much of this general apathy is due to the fact I’m not much of a fan of John Wayne in general. Most of the blame for that can be laid at my father’s feet, as he didn’t put much effort into indoctrinating me to The Duke at a young age, though that is because he isn’t much of a fan of John Wayne either. Oh sure he likes him, and if a John Wayne film comes on TV he will sit down and watch it until the end regardless of how many times he has already seen the film, but that is just about as much effort as he will go to. If asked he will say “I love John Wayne.” and he does mean it. But he doesn’t love John Wayne like he loves It’s a Wonderful Life or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s filmography (For the record he is particularly fond of Predator and Total Recall). So while he never took me to a John Wayne film, he certainly took me to Schwarzenegger films (and Sylvester Stallone films, and Kurt Russell films, and Jean-Claude Van Damme films), and as an adolescent in the 80’s you really couldn’t ask for much more out of a father.

But since I was never exposed to John Wayne as a child, I never developed that particular allowance that one must have with John Wayne, that being that all of his movies are exactly the same. Never a time was this fact more obvious then this past Christmas, when my family stumbled upon an old John Wayne western that was playing.

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You know what sucks? Moving. You know what sucks more then moving? Unpacking. Sure moving during a snowstorm was annoying and unpleasant. But this eternal shuffling of boxes and furniture from room to room is unbearable. It starts out innocuous enough, boxes go in the rooms in which they designated until everything is unloaded and in the apartment. Then the insanity happens.

You start unpacking in the kitchen because you are hungry, only to discover the cabinets are too small to hold any of your pans. Or maybe your oven is from the 1950’s and is larger then a Cadillac, yet for some reason seems to not have a pilot light anywhere for the oven, thus effectively tying your dinner preparation to only the stove top. But why just the stove top? Surely you have a microwave you can use? Well, it seems the architects who designed this building in 1920 didn’t have microwave’s in mind, and thus decided to wire four of the five rooms onto one circuit, leading to a fuse being blown every time one tries to nuke a burrito. I’ve been here seven days and already have gone through three fuses. It’s a race to see who comes out on top!

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Not even a snow storm on the day I move can keep me from posting an update. Next week I review a South Korean film. Does it involve ghosts? Is their a South Korean film that doesn’t? Will Kurt finally be unable to resist commenting? All these questions and several that are actually important answered in next weeks review of A Tale of Two Sisters.