Apparently you can get away with any amount of torture porn if you counterbalance it with a finger-wagging story about the corrupting power of revenge. This South Korean nightmare from Kim Jee-woon (
The Good, the Bad, the Weird) begins with a masterly execution of an old horror trope: a young woman, stranded in the middle of nowhere when her car breaks down, is murdered by a cunning predator (Choi Min-sik). But sickening scenes of this serial killer dismembering his victims will test all but the most sadistic gore hounds, and the movie's chief plot twist—the young woman's traumatized husband (Lee Byung-hun), a government agent, implants the madman with a high-tech tracking device so he can be cornered and maimed again and again—plays like a plodding variation on Park Chan-wook's operatic "Vengeance Trilogy." In Korean with subtitles.
By
J.R. Jones