Movies: Drink up.

Was any movie more praised on release, only to be more neglected come best-of list time than Thirst, Chan-wook Park's stylish and tormented subversion of the modern strain of vampire romance? That horror bloggers regularly made room on their lists for dreck like the My Bloody Valentine remake or Raimi's smirking phoned-in greatest hit clip collection Drag Me to Hell, while no less a L7 venue like Time Magazine placed Thirst in its top-ten films of the decade list seriously undermines the common blogger accusation that the media mainstream that doesn't get horror.

Though I'm certain it originally received a boost from the critical and popular buzz surrounding the late '08 arrival of Let the Right One In, I now wonder if it wasn't ultimately overshadowed by that film in the minds of fright fans. How many times can you shake up the canon of all time vampire greats in the space of a few months? (This is why the general mediocrity of the Great Zombie Revival is actually the key to its success: A subgenre that reinvents itself in mind-blowing ways every two or three films is going to exhaust the mental bandwidth of its audience as well as sow some discord among people who latch on some particular configuration of the genre elements and decide to become purists. But a certain pandering familiarity, spiced with only slight hints of novelty, neither taxes your audience nor risks alienating them.)

Much of the pleasure of Thirst comes from the development of the film's characters, so I'm going to forego my usual plot summary as I think it would ruin the film for potential viewers. Still, I want to praise Park's strange narrative talents. A comparison to Right One is helpful. While both films focus intensely on a central couple and the impact vampirism has on their relationship, Thirst is an explicitly darker and more relentless film. LtROI played some of its important themes so close to the vest that many viewers convinced themselves that they were watching a relatively uncomplicated love story - the odd impulse to hold Right One up as the anti-Twilight while simultaneously defanging the darkness at its core that genuinely made the film deserve that title was one of the stranger contortions of '08 Blog-Tweet Pro Am season. Thirst is far more excessive and unforgiving. Where Oskar's grim future and Eli predatory nature are only hinted at in the same hesitating and timid way Oskar approaches the world around him, Thirst is built on the same damning and stage-managed logic of Park's revenge thrillers. The fate of the lovers in Thirst is at once surprising and yet never in doubt. When faced with the paradox of God's omniscience and humanity's free will, an ancient theologian once proposed that God was not hip to every teeny, tiny detail of every decision and its consequences, but he always knew the ultimate end of every moral decision because he built the universe with his biases hardwired into it, making the outcome of any decision inevitable. To use an analogy, I don't need to know when you're going to let go of the pen in your hand or where it is going to land to tell that it will fall. While I find this is an utterly unsatisfactory explanation of how free will can exist when all decisions and outcomes are already known, it's a perfect description of what it feels like to watch a Chan-wook Park flick. One never loses the feeling that Park's characters are agents in their world. Their decisions carry an emotional heft and their passions, while operatically grand, seem to genuinely drive them. But you also never lose the sense of Park's malevolent presence: He never pulls their strings, but rather bends the world against them. Park's characters are always free act, but the consequences are ultimately decided by a sinister intelligence beyond their control. In a thriller like Park's Oldboy, the director has a context for this approach: His characters are literally in the grips of meticulous conspiracy. Robbed of that literalism, Park's controlling style could have easily come off as clumsy heavy-handedness. Instead, it expands into something cosmic, brutal, and tragic. Park's priestly main character who loses his faith in an all-powerful, all-good God; in Gods place, Park takes the role of a divine being who is all-powerful, but certainly not all-good. This approach can still lead Park wrong on occasion. For example, Park’s purposefully unsubtle approach to symbolism reminds me of a screenwriting advice Paul Schrader once gave students: "Placing the action of a scene in front of a cross does not make it symbolic."

Park's flick - with its black hole for a heart - would be an insufferable emotional endurance test if he didn't have the visual chops to sell it. I'll admit that I've never much liked Park's thrillers. OldboyThirst strikes me as a more assured work. Perhaps just slightly less gory than the work Park usually produces, it still pulls no punches. More importantly, however, Park's confidence in the face of his own violent visions has increased. Thirst is beautiful even when it is at its most horrible. In one scene, Park captures blood flowing from the priest's mouth, down and through a bone white recorder he's playing. The red streams of blood seem so weighty, so alive, that they evoke a tactile response. The viewer wants to feel them. Long after every film is a 3D spectacle, our grandchild will pity us for our sad little 2D cinema. It will be impossible to explain to them that, before 3D came around, good filmmakers didn't need it to create an immersive experience.

Finally, Ok-bin Kim does a monumental job with the character of Tae-Ju, the distaff half of our lead couple. In a genre notorious for lame and flat female characters, Tae-Ju is such a perfect combination of victim and predator, slave and tyrant that she dominates the screen whenever she appears. Ok-bin Kim manages the trick of turning what would, in lesser hands, appear like breakneck changes in direction and, instead, make them appear as if these features were always part of Tae-Ju, only now we’re seeing them expressed in a frightening and refined form. Her performance was, for my money, the best performance in a horror flick in 2009, perhaps one of the best in any genre. struck me as profoundly uneven. Too often it seemed like Park's mastery of the medium was overwhelmed by the imagery he was constructing. When he was on fire - such as the hammer fight scene - his style framed his visual excess in a way that gave them dramatic value beyond the punch of repulsion. But too often, his style left him, as if the violence he portrayed stunned him in the role of passive spectator.

Movies: These shoes are just killin' me.

Korean director Yong gyun-Kim's 2005 The Red Shoes, a spookshow about a cursed pair of pinkish-red high-heels, is notable in part for its curious influences. Although the flick traffics in images and plot points familiar to Western audiences from the Ring-led J-horror invasion – ghost girls with long black hair in their faces, puzzle-like curses, and so on – it draws inspiration from two unlikely sources: Hans Christian Andersen and the 1948 British melodrama The Red Shoes.

The first unlikely source is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of The Red Shoes. Andersen actually snags a posthumous co-writing credit. Bowdlerized versions of this story have a young woman finding a magical pair of red shoes. She slips them on and they make her the best dancer in the town. As befits the psychological needs of our modern validation-desperate whelp, the girl comes to learn that it was her own desire and, perhaps, her willingness to dare to greatness (in a way that wouldn't alienate others or take undue advantage of the varying skill levels of the other dancers, natch) that made her such a good dancer. Optimally, we also learn that sharing is caring, we're all special, and meat and sugar are the biochemical basis of homophobia. Little of this, of course, has much to do with Andersen's original fairy tale. As he penned it, the girl, Karen, puts on red shoes to go to church. This is a no-no – black shoes for church, people – that Karen will be punished for to an absurd extent. The shoes start to dance and Karen can't take them off. She dances all day and night, cursed by neighbors and even angels, until she finds a kind village executioner who will chop off her feet. The dancing shoes, feet still in them, dance off into the sunset and Karen repents the sin of wearing inappropriate church clothes.

Read that to the wee ones just before beddy-bye.

The second, un-credited source, is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic The Red Shoes. Itself supposedly an adaptation of Andersen's tale, this well-loved flick currently rests in the number 8 position on the British Film Institute's irregular ranking of their domestic product. The film tells the story of a young ballet artist, Vicky Page, trapped between the affections of a young composer, Julian, and her brutally forceful director, Boris. Vicky quickly rises to fame in the ballet world, but Boris is insanely jealous of Julian and demands that Vicky choose between her lover and dancing. Vicky, surprisingly, chooses to stay with Julian and leaves the troop. But married life does not suit Vicky, who was meant to be on the stage. Boris bullies and seduces her to run away from her husband and perform again. Julian finds out Vicky's ditched and shows up at her dressing room with an ultimatum: the ballet or our marriage. This time, Vicky chooses a third option and commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. With her last breath, she tells Julian to remove her red shoes.

Yong gyun-Kim's horror version reintroduces the element of magical footwear, but borrows liberally from the imagery of Powell's justly worshipped film. Kim's film opens with a warm-up scare on a nearly empty subway platform. A young girl, exasperatedly waiting for a late friend, spies a pair of empty, red shoes near the edge of the platform. She picks up the shoes and puts them on. Suddenly, her friend appears and claims the shoes as her own. They argue and wrestle and, finally, her friend snatches the shoes and walks off. The friend puts on the shoes and begins making her way to the station exit. Before she can reach it, however, she's halted by a ghost who takes back the shoes, destroying the young girl's feet, and leaves her to bleed to death through the raw stumps on the end of her legs. Ouch.

Once the wake up bit of nasty business is done, the pacing of The Red Shoes slows considerably. We follow the sad sack life of Sun-jae, a vision therapist and avid shoe collector, is trapped in domestic hell. Her husband in a callous jerk who is bagging exo-marital trim on the side and their only daughter, Tae-su, make no bones out of liking her father more than her mother. Sun-jae's crappy life takes a drastic turn when, having lost track of her daughter somewhere in the city, she runs home to see if the little one has shown up there. Happily, Tae-su did. Unfortunately, Sun-jae got there first and caught her hubby making the beast with two backs – one of which was definitely not hers.

Sun-jae and Tae-su move to the downmarket section of town, exchanging the sterile enormity of their old home for an apartment so rundown grungy that it appears to have been entirely washed in a coating of chewing tobacco spit. Sun-jae tries to start up a new eye clinic, falling in with a young, carefree architect who will be the flick's love interest. And - despite living in an apartment that is lit like a torture chamber and decorated in shades of sickly green, rust red, and inky black – things are kinda looking up.

Enter the shoes!

One night, riding the subway, Sunny J sees the shoes on the train. Being a shoe junkie, she takes the eponymous footwear home. Trouble begins immediately. Sunny J and her daughter immediately begin fighting, sometimes quite physically, over the shoes. Strangers begin reacting strangely to her, either fleeing her or attacking her and demanding the shoes. Her only friend steals the shoes, only to die in a nasty "accident" that ends with the removal of her feet. And, like the cat of camp song fame, the shoes just keep coming back. Again and again, the cursed clogs appear inexplicably in her daughter's clutches.

In an effort to escape the shoes' baleful influence, Sun-jae and her beau investigate the history of the house and shoes, linking the curse to a love triangle gone bad between a choreographer and two ballet dancers that ended in all manner of murder and supernatural carnage during Korea's era as a vassal state to Japan (1910 to 1945). But, in the course the investigation, Sun-jae's boytoy discovers that she's been pulling a snow job: Not only did she never divorce her husband, but the hubby has weirdly vanished from the scene. What up with that?

Red Shoes is an interesting, but uneven contribution to the growing body of Asian ghost stories available in the West. Filmmaker Yong gyun-Kim does a lot right. The film is a deft combination of Western and Eastern ghost story tropes. There's plenty of The Ring on display (the way that the style of a handful of manga artists became something akin multinational regional "official" style, the once cheapo subgenre of J-horror is becoming not only Japan's nation language of film horror, but the dominant mode of horror cinema for much of Asia). The long-haired ghosts, the flickering florescent light fixtures, the jump scares, the game-like curse rules, the soft and deep color palates, and a "gotcha" denouement are here for anybody who is an aficionado of the subgenre. But, to the betterment of the film experience, Yong gyun-Kim mixes in a wealth of extra-Asian influences and references. The ballet theme, the train, and the titular red shoes themselves, we've covered. Alert viewers will also catch nods to non-J-horror inspirations as disparate as Nightmare on Elm Street and American Werewolf in London. The narrative structure more resembles The Exorcist and Poltergeist than the countdown structure or repetitious drumming pattern of J-horror classics like The Ring, The Grudge, and Pulse. Not that the Western spookshow hooks are necessary superior. Instead, it simply lets a little fresh air into a formulaic approach the too easily becomes a straight jacket for filmmakers.

The negatives, however, aren't easy to overlook. The visual style is pretty derivative. This looks like a dozen other well-made but not particularly inspired J-horror spawned flicks. The acting is quite uneven, a feature that sticks out all the more due to the fact that the film's protagonist, the lovely Hye-su Kim, is really great at half her role. Though there are dozens of actors who look better slightly abused, Kim is one of the few actresses who is most captivating when she looks tired, abused, and trapped. Sitting on a subway train, half dead, after a long day's work, Kim touches some deep well of sympathy. Unfortunately, the flick also asks her to do a lot of somewhat absurd crap and that doesn't work out so well. Finally, and perhaps worst, is the "gotcha" ending that actually starts out promisingly but devolves into a phantasmagoric finale that is less otherworldly than lazy.

I enjoyed The Red Shoes. It's leisurely pacing drew me in and the domestic strife it depicted had the sharp edge of the real that good drama captures. The best ghost stories are, ultimately, about human relationships. Not only the victims, but the relationships that continue to bind the restless dead to this world. At its best, The Red Shoes gets that. But, the film loses its way near the end, ultimately failing to deliver on its early promise. Potential viewers should consider themselves forewarned.