Daespo Naughty Girls
Director: E J-yong
Year: 2006
Rating: 6.0
Country: Korea
The film visually
drops you into an old-fashioned confection shop of dazzling multi-colored
sweets. Pinks and pastels run over you. Absurdity underpins everything. Lavishly
styled with only a hint of a plot, this is based on a Korean webtoon that
by all accounts is strongly sexual in nature about a high school filled with
perversity, diversity and an anything goes attitude. Director E J-yong (Untold
Scandal) takes the concept but turns it into a surreal almost family friendly
series of weird unstructured skits loosely connected. Named Musseulmo High
School which translates to Useless High School. All religions are taught
and practiced and all the girls are young enough to still be called very
cute. Every hopeful young Korean actor at the time must be in there somewhere.
The film bursts with youthful energy, inventiveness and musical numbers.
The sex is toned down considerably. One
female student played by Kim Ok-vin (Voice, The Villainess) lives in a one
room squalid space with her mother and literally has poverty clinging to
her back in the form of a stuffed doll. In order to pay the rent, she tries
her hand at prostitution - though a virgin - her first customer just wants
to play a video game and the next is a cross-dressing leader of a gang and
just wants to talk girlie things with her. That is as close to sex as the
film gets.
There are allusions to it though. In the
first scene, the substitute teacher informs the class that their regular
teacher has an STD. This causes a panic because everyone but one in the class
had sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with the teacher.
The Kevin Bacon theory. The one is poor Cyclops who only has one eye -
in the middle of his forehead. His adorable sister (Lee Eun-sung) is called
Double Eyes because she has two of them. In the right place. Unfortunately,
for Anthony who has a crush on her, she is a he with a penis. This is confusing
for him because he finds himself still drawn to him. Till he sees an erection
form under her dress.
The film then leaps into a cotton candy
musical number with seven girls all dressed in pink with short blonde hair
dance through the school. Some of the bits hit the mark such as the Shakey
Dance by Kim Ok-vin after she is kidnapped by a Sex Cult or Anthony having
to use an outdoor toilet that is a hole in the floor. But some of them go
on too long and lose their energy. Sort of hit and miss but visually a joy.
