Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) first published by EyeforFilm Vengeance always begets more vengeance. Park Chan-wook never intended that the bleak social commentary of Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002) and the Oedipal extravagance of OldBoy (2003) should be conceived as related projects, but after Korean journalists hounded him over his new-found obsession with violent revenge, he…
Silent Grace first published (Mar 2, 2004) by Movie Gazette Arrested at a military checkpoint for joyriding, young glue-sniffing rebel-without-a-cause Aine (Cathleen Brady) insists before the court, in a willfully impetuous lie, that she is a Republican. Accordingly she is sent to the Republican section of the Armagh Women’s Prison, where the five genuine IRA prisoners,…
First published by Film Inernational If ever proof were needed that genre is what you make of it, then one only need look to Japan’s ‘pink’ cinema of the 1970s, where the lowest of exploitation subgenres was being approached with the highest of artistic sensibilities, disinterring unexpectedly exquisite treasures from the trash. In School of the…
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 first published by EyeforFilm The women-in-prison (or WIP) film has a long and sordid history as one of exploitation cinema’s more unsavoury subgenres. So at first glance, Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, with its badass inmates, its sadistic guards, and its girl-on-girl action (in every sense), ought to be dismissible as…