AACHI AND SSIPAK

You know that movie you like thats really REALLY weird but you love it anyway because it's just so much fun? Well, Aachi & Ssipak beats it up and takes its lunch money.This is an animated Korean film by director Joe Beom-jin who almost certainly likes drugs a whole bunch. Fortunately much like the Beatles, he appears to be one of those guys who does their best work while stoned out of his frakking gourd.

First the setting of the film. Prepare yourself because I guarantee that almost immediately you're going to say to yourself that this sounds repulsive and like something you'd rather sit through a Merchant-Ivory film festival than see. I assure you that you are mistaken. Stay with me here.

The film is about "a futuristic world powered entirely by human feces. With the government anxious to control this sole, important source of energy, they install special sensors on its citizens' anuses to monitor production, while controlling the populace by distributing addictive popsicles."

Still there? That description almost kept me away. I may like a lot of weird things but a fecalpheliac I am not. However, due to the crazed murderous looks I got from friends on the FF staff who had already seen it when I told them I might skip it, I went anyway.

HOLY MOTHERF$^%KING S#%T! IS THIS MOVIE AMAZING!

Sorry, but an expletive or even a long string of them is the best way to describe this film's totally bizarre supah-cool kickassitude that seeps from every frame. I could keep just drooling fanboy sentiments here but I'll just buy the t-shirt and get on with the actual review.

Aachi and Ssipak are two punks in the city who roll people taking a crap in public outhouses for their popsicles (called Juicy Bars). Not exactly hero material. When the two cross paths with a porn star named Beauty who drops mutant craps that make the system deliver hundreds of juicy bars each time, they both fall for her in their own way, but so do numerous other factions.

The chase is on to capture or protect Beauty and madness rains down from every corner of their messed up little dystopia. The blue meanies, which look like a cross between the blue meanies from Yellow Submarine and the Smurfs, are mutated juicy bar addicts who will do anything to get their hands on the girl. These cute looking but lethal villains are constantly in firefights with the city police and their super cyborg cop who rains down death like the Terminator crossed with every John Woo Protagonist rolled up in a burrito and given cheat codes. Caught in between are the cowardly but greedy (and lovestruck) Aachi and Ssipak who sneak around the edges of the madness trying to regain their lost Beauty.

Still not sold? How about this? The most amazing, detailed, creative and intense action scenes to come down the cinematic pike since, well, almost ever. Right from the first seconds of the film where the blue meanies pull a Road Warrior-ish raid on a juicy bar transport but are foiled by the super cyborg cop, things get insane and wonderful. Your eyes will be darting around the screen trying to see everything happening as cartoon and CG animation meet and destroy everything in their path as the comical ultra-violence makes you alternatively laugh and gasp at it's intensity.

The references. Jesus. Is it too much? I caught blatant references to Terminator 2, Aliens, Superman, Batman, True Romance, Battleship Potempkin (or The Untouchables if you're not a film student), Seven, Basic Instinct, Misery, and lots more. Oh, and pretty much the entire mine cart chase from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In an American film I suppose I would have said "Enough already!" but seeing them done in Korean is actually kind of charming and even flattering (speaking as an American).

Some will have problems with the sexual and fecal content. It even made me gag in a few places. In no way shape or form is this appropriate for young kids. This isn't even appropriate for Heavy Metal. But if you're the kind of guy like me that can just laugh at the sick stuff and admire the rest, this is a must-see and easily one of the most enjoyable films I've seen all year.