fish tank Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Kang Je-Gyu – 1999 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 125m

****

South Korean intelligence men track a North Korean sniper who has gone to Earth – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

This South Korean box office success story is a hard-boiled action movie, an Asian cross between Die Hard John McTiernan, 1988) and Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) which could probably have been made in no other country. The North Korean villains in recent Bond outing Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002) seem saintly by comparison with the brainwashed, gun-toting mercenaries here, one of whom – deadly female sniper Hee (Kim Yun-jin) – goes to Earth following a series of assassinations of South Korean government officials.

But when some years later, Southern intelligence men Ryu (Han Suk-kyu) and Lee (Song Kang-ho) prove unable to prevent several likely targets from being killed by notorious Northern terrorist Park (Choi Min‑sik), the vanished Hee is their primary suspect for pulling the trigger.

Made in 1999, it originally concerned a slightly post-millennial future, which aspect has been lost with the film taking some four years to reach these shores.… Read the rest

Sting

Director – Kiah Roache-Turner – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 91m

***1/2

A girl traps a venomous spider and cares for it as a pet, but as she feeds it, it grows… and grows… and gets out… – onto UK Home Premiere on Monday, July 15th

Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) is hearing strange noises in her Brooklyn apartment. She doesn’t remember so good, however, helpfully pinned to the wall by the phone is her name and address. So when she phones Frank the pest exterminator (Jermaine Fowler), she can read those details to him. It’s probably a rat, he tells her. Soon he is at the door of the block, asking her to buzz him in. But inside the apartment, he realises this particular bug may be more than he bargained for.

Flash back to four days earlier. A hand-sized meteor plunges to Earth to crash through a window into a doll’s house in the same apartment block. It is a tiny pod not unlike the ones in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). It opens, hatching a small spider, which looks huge until we realise it’s in a small scale doll’s house, not outside in the apartment proper. The spider is found by Charlotte (Alyla Brown from Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, George Miller, 2024) who empties out her money jar, the one with the screw lid, to make a home for it, feeding it with the roaches that infest the apartment.… Read the rest