PARADISE MURDERED Korean Limited Edition DVD review

Editor, Europe; Rotterdam, The Netherlands (@ardvark23)
PARADISE MURDERED Korean Limited Edition DVD review

First-time director Kim Han-Min made a few waves back in April with his thriller "Paradise Murdered", grabbing the number 1 position at the Korean Box-Office but not breaking any records.

As usual in Korea, it's just a few months later and the DVD is already in the stores. Also usual in Korea, the movie itself has good English subtitles attached to it but unfortunately all of the extras don't.

Listen please, Korean distributors. Stop this silly tradition of not subtitling your extras!
You have a deserved reputation for releasing some of the world's finest editions, and if rumors are true your home-market for sold DVD's is rather lousy. You know you sell a lot of these abroad to English-speaking countries because you subtitled the movie itself.
So please put subs under the remainder as well, or at least subtitle just the commentaries. They're always on the same disc as the movie so you can forget about the other discs!
I always love to hear what the creators have to say about the movies, and this specific Limited Edition sports no less than three commentary tracks that I can't follow. Tantalizing and cruel!

As for the movie itself, it's a nice murder-mystery kind of thriller, where you spend most of the time watching people doing odd things and hoping it'll all be explained at the end. Which thankfully happens, but the extras hint at a significantly different movie.

Read on...

The Plot:

South-Korea,1986: in one of the mainland harbors a severed head is found in the water. It is assumed the head originates from Geukrakdo, a small nearby island which name means "Paradise Island" (although pronouncing it with the accent on a different syllable makes it "Evil Island"). The police take a look but find a creepy setting. All 17 men, women and children known to live on Geukrakdo have disappeared and there is plenty evidence of violence. What the hell happened in this place, voted "Best Remote Island To Live On" two years in a row?

Flashbacks show that a few days earlier, after a party, a gambling disagreement leads to a brutal murder. As the assumed killer has disappeared and the island's only radio has been sabotaged, all inhabitants of Geukrakdo become (rightfully) more stressful. Before you know it the people start talking about the "Curse of the Chaste Woman", a widow starved to death a century earlier, whose ghost is supposedly still roaming the island searching for food. Even more inexplicable are the bags of money that keep appearing and disappearing. Then the next body is found...

Now everybody just needs to sit tight and wait for 48 hours till the police arrives. What could possibly go wrong in the meantime...?


The Movie:

If the plot description seemed somewhat vague, that's entirely on purpose. This movie can quite easily be spoiled by explaining "what happened", something I hopefully avoided. Unfortunately it makes reviewing this film, and me mentioning what I liked or not liked, a lot harder. So I can't say a lot more except that writer-director Kim Han-Min has created a nifty conceit in the story, which allows for explaining away all inconsistencies. It's not so radical and outlandish as, say, "The Matrix" or "Sixth Sense", but any complaints about bad acting, sudden strange behavior, or even hallucinations can be easily dismissed with a "that's because of...".

As conceits go it's a good one, I didn't feel cheated or annoyed by any obvious impossibilities. And no, even though you have the "Best Remote Island To Live On Two Years in a Row" bit it's not the Korean version of Hot Fuzz either. It's quite a clever one, so "Well done!" I say. But...

The problem I have with the conceit is how it's finally revealed to the audience. As the movie is now, the police bookends the story on the island. You see them at work without a clue at the start, and somewhat more knowledgeable at the end. The deleted scenes however show that a lot of footage had been shot of the police figuring out for themselves what happened, independent from the story told in flashback on the island. I get the impression that this approach gave the game away too soon though, and made the puzzle far too easy to unravel. But with these scenes gone, the remaining clues are so vague and seemingly insignificant, that the reveal now has become almost impossible to predict and comes a bit out of left field. It's not an easy one either: you get hit by tons of necessary exposition all of a sudden.

So you get the impression that this movie was hurt by the severe changes made afterwards. Nevertheless it's a fun ride. Sometimes even a bit too funny: (c)rude comedy is inserted on numerous occasions in the first half, like for example all murder theories are shown with the victims still alive and the murderer being a clumsy ninja, but it leaves the movie after a while. This can be explained because the movie becomes too gritty for it (the children on the island are not automatically exempt from the violence) but it makes the inclusion earlier on rather baffling.
Still,"Paradise Murdered" manages to portray successfully the weird combination of freedom and claustrophobia you get when living in such a small community, and seeing it all fall apart is interesting to say the least.

The movie looks very good, making nice use of the location of the island, which is basically a steep rock with some fields and houses peppered on it. Acting varies between good and cartoonish, which for some characters is explainable, for others less so. Park Hae-Il, known as the revolutionary uncle who is good at everything except throwing Molotov-cocktails in "The Host", plays the role closest to what can be called a lead, as the island's doctor who tries to keep everyone from panicking. It's a very restrained role and that makes it hard to sympathize with him, because he's enigmatic enough to be suspect. Park keeps it from getting too obviously creepy or too obviously a red herring, which can't have been easy. Praise also goes to Sung Ji-Ru who portrays the island's Resident Drunk, and Park Sol-Mi as the teacher who obviously sports a crush for the doctor.


Conclusion:

So all in all it's a flawed but nice thriller. It may not hit all the goals it wanted to achieve, but at the same time it's not pretentious either, and as pure entertainment it's difficult to find faults with this. Recommended.


On to the DVD:

KD-Media has released "Paradise Murdered" as a two-disc Limited Edition, with disc One being the movie and disc Two being the extras. It's not as fantastically "pimped" as some of these editions are (all contents fit in a single Amaray, which is covered with a slipcase) but what's there is still nice. There's a folder explaining the relations between the 17 inhabitants, a replica of the note in the screenshot above and a signed card. I can't read Korean, so I unfortunately do not have the foggiest who signed it...

The image looks fine on television (see the screenshots), but high-end equipment will show the transfer to be quite ugly: the image is very soft and features a big overscan area (a black border on all four sides). To brighten up the non-sharp images the colors and contrast have been boosted, resulting in oddities like some peoples' faces looking nearly orange at times, and edge-enhancement has been used to re-introduce a bit of sharpness. At least there is a total absence of "combing" this time... but to be honest it looks like a restored classic instead of a new movie.

No harsh words for the audio though: an excellent Dolby 5.1 mix makes you hear the sea all around, and specific noises come from the directions you'd like them to come from, including right behind you on occasion. Subs are good.

Extras:
Got a minute? There are three commentaries on disc one, but without English subs I can't tell you much about them. Especially the third is a big mystery to me, but the first is director Kim Han-Min with some of the actors and the second one is Kim Han-Min agian, but this time with the producer.

On disc 2 there's over 4 hours worth of footage, so thanks for the effort KD-Media... but again without subs. The print on the discs, and the titles of the segments are in English though, like it's teasing you to maybe expect English-friendliness. Alas... teasing only it is.

These extras are:

1: the making of: which shows not all of the bad weather on set was faked.
2: art-direction: constructing the sets, props and buildings.
3: make-up and wardrobe: which shows some of the bloody effects, and surprisingly features work on a fake-looking monster (!) not seen as such in the final film.
4: something which I thought was a trailer of sorts, but turns out to be a character profile for six of the "leads".
5: deleted scenes: dozens, with loads of interesting stuff including the police investigation and a changed ending showing that thing (!) the make-up was working on (so blurry that it doesn't look fake anymore).
6: a press conference with the director and the main actors, most notable for showing that Park Sol-Mi looks damn fine in that dress.
7: the preview: what we normally call "A Trailer".
8: photo gallery: lots of photographs, some of them quite funny.
9: lo and behold, a small movie! It's called "Ghost Story" and is labelled as a model for Paradise Murdered, but I failed to see any significant link except for having the same writer-director. It is a funny story about three kids living by themselves, being abused by their landlord and nearly starving to death. This doesn't seem laughable but it's filmed as a silent movie, complete with flickering image and text-slides telling what's being said (in my case, guessing what's being said). There's a brilliant foot-chase in it involving stolen fish, and the final resolution to all the kids' troubles is a good joke if you like your humor grim and black.

All in all a nice package of extras supplementing a main feature which should have had a better image-quality.

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