{"id":3147,"date":"2009-09-28T23:58:27","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T03:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=3147"},"modified":"2009-09-29T20:02:22","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T00:02:22","slug":"thirst-2009-chan-wook-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/3147","title":{"rendered":"Thirst (2009, Chan-wook Park)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a vampire thriller with comic parts, but an all-out comedy. I used to think Park was someone to take seriously with his vengeance trilogy, but after this and I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay<\/a><\/em>, I’m not sure he was ever serious. Maybe it has always been dark humor, and he never had anything to say about revenge – there’s nothing I can remember, anyway, and surely nothing to match K. Kurosawa’s Eyes of the Spider<\/em>. Complaints aside, this was entertaining as hell and the sparse crowd was laughing and yelling in horror and delight.<\/p>\n

Great to see the star of The Host<\/a><\/em> again on the big screen, and just as good (if not better) was his 20-year-old costar Ok-vin Kim. Anyway, a priest volunteers to be injected with a painfully fatal disease in the name of science, but during a blood transfusion on his deathbed, accidentally gets turned into a vampire. Still a priest, he’s trying to be the most humane vampire he can be, killing nobody and drinking blood from coma patients through their feed tubes. But then he falls for wild young Tae-joo and leaves the priesthood to have an affair with her behind the back of her husband (Ha-kyun Shin, father of the dead girl in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance<\/em>). She’s messed up and amoral from the start, and our man begins to fall – killing his blind friend and the girl’s husband so they can be together. But then she becomes a vampire and starts killing everyone in sight, so he drives them out to the middle of nowhere and waits for the sun to come up…<\/p>\n

No messing around with stakes through the heart, garlic or other vampire business – we never even see the original vampires who infected these two. Their super strength adds to the comic-book atmosphere, jumping across rooftops, denting lampposts, tearing apart a car with his bare hands.<\/p>\n

This died at the theater with hardly anyone hearing about it. Weird that foreign action\/horror movies don’t seem to stand a chance in theaters here, while talky family dramas do fine. I’d think The Good, The Bad & The Weird<\/a><\/em>, Sukiyaki Western Django<\/a><\/em> and this could pull a bigger crowd than Summer Hours<\/a><\/em> and Revanche<\/em>, but I guess that’s why I’m not paid to book theaters.<\/p>\n

Steve McQueen’s Hunger<\/em> was playing last week, and I meant to catch it so I could watch Hunger<\/em> and Thirst<\/em> back-to-back, but sadly reality prevailed over gimmickry and I missed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not a vampire thriller with comic parts, but an all-out comedy. I used to think Park was someone to take seriously with his vengeance trilogy, but after this and I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay, I’m not sure he was ever serious. Maybe it has always been dark humor, and he never had anything to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[741,54,229,186],"class_list":["post-3147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-chan-wook-park","tag-horror","tag-korea","tag-vampires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3298,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions\/3298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}