Spoilers ahead!

Thirst opens today in the United States, and is the long-awaited new film from Park, whose cult hit Oldboy is a disturbing, ultraviolent mindfuck. Like Oldboy, Thirst is about characters who yearn for release from their prisons, only to discover that freedom is another kind of cage. And using an unsettling combination of slapstick, horror, and pathos, Park pleasingly turns the vampire mythos on its head.

San-hyeon (played by Song Kang-ho from "The Host") is a priest in an alternate-reality South Korea where a black plague-like virus causes people to barf blood, grow pustules, and quickly die. To help the patients he tends, the priest volunteers to leave Korea and participate in an experiment where he'll be infected with the virus and doctors can try experimental cures on him. Miraculously, after several gory scenes of infection, San-hyeon makes a full recovery under the foreign doctors' care. He returns home, where he becomes a kind of saint - everybody wants him to cure them, or to bless them. But he gradually realizes that his recovery was not due to medical science. He's become a vampire, and he needs to drink blood to prevent the infection from returning and killing him.

At this point, Thirst truly enters the dreamy, disturbing world of psychological horror. Park manages to sidestep a lot of the cliches of this subgenre by injecting seemingly inappropriate bits of humor - we see San-hyeon trying to drink blood "morally" by sipping from the IV lines of comatose patients. There's a mischievous satire of Catholicism here, too, with San-hyeon's very existence seeming to embody church hypocrisy.

When the priest decides to join some parishioners for mah-jong, he meets Tae-ju, the beautiful and frustrated wife of his dim-witted childhood friend. An orphan, she was taken in by his friend's family, treated like dirt, and essentially forced to marry a man who needs his nose wiped for him. With his vampy desires turned up to mega-levels, San-hyeon can't resist Tae-ju, and they fall into a heated but bizarre sexual affair. I honestly couldn't decide if the sex scenes were intended to be wacky or hot or both, and that made them seem somehow more intimate - even though there isn't a lot of nudity, you feel like you are watching something deeply private as these inexperienced lovers bumble their way through a haze of physical desire.

While San-hyeon feels guilty for all he's doing, Tae-ju embraces their relationship with a scary ferocity (young actress Kim Ok-vin plays her with feral childishness). She wants nothing more than to escape her claustrophic family life, her needy husband and controlling mother-in-law. And she manages to pull San-hyeon down a dark path in order to break free of them. With his priest's robes, superstrength, and newfound carnality, San-hyeon has come to embody the romantic vampire myth - except that he's still trying to be moral. Eventually, he brings Tae-ju into undeath with him and their world really gets grotesque.

Throughout the film, we never forget that these characters' new status as monsters does not release them from the burdens of humanity. They cannot just fling away their responsibilities and become joyful creatures of the night. The priest still has his parishioners and brothers of the cloth; and Tae-ju has her (awful) family and household. No matter how craven the two of them get, they still take a creepy kind of responsibility for their community.

It's this emotional paradox - abandon coupled with duty - that makes our characters so intriguing. They are trapped by social expectations in a society that doesn't acknowledge their existence.

There are certainly flaws in Thirst, not the least of which is its long running time - almost 2 hours - which causes some of the comedy to go sour. Scenes that should be quick, freaky ballets of violent comedy are drawn out into unwelcome queasiness like a SNL skit that's gone on too long. Perhaps that's Park's intent, but it feels clumsy rather than artful. And a subplot about the couple's guilt over what they've done to Tae-ju's husband feels gratuitous and tacked-on. We already know they feel guilty - that's the point of the film - so there's no need to drive it home further.

Despite these problems, the movie is one of the most compelling and genuinely strange portraits of vampire life I've ever seen. In this way, it resembles Let The Right One In, which never denies complexity to its characters. Thirst will get under your skin, and scenes from the film will infect your mind for days afterward, refusing to let you go.

Thirst via IMDB

The director explains Vampire Lore, with video clips of the many different vampiric traits of his undead character:

The story of the moral vampire priest, Thirst will be in select theaters July 31st.

Thirst
You know Park Chan-Wook's work from Old Boy, but I'm really curious to see this director's take on self restraint, religion and lust, through the lens of a vamped-out priest. We've got a look at the latest one sheet from the movie as well as the trailer. The movie itself has been getting praised for style, but a little roughed up over edits and pace - yeah, it's Park Chan-Wook, I'm still going to go see it. The film will be released in select theaters on July 31.

Official Synopsis:

Sang-hyun (The Host) is a priest who cherishes life; so much so, that he selflessly volunteers for a secret vaccine development project meant to eradicate a deadly virus. But the virus takes the priest, and a blood transfusion is urgently ordered up for him. The blood he receives is infected, so Sang-hyun lives – but now exists as a vampire. Struggling with his newfound carnal desire for blood, Sang-hyun's faith is further strained when a childhood friend's wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), comes to him asking for his help in escaping her life. Sang-hyun soon plunges into a world of sensual pleasures, finding himself on intimate terms with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Thirst Red Band Trailer:

Blood The Last Vampire
Based on the Manga series, Blood follows a 400-year-old halfling vampire slayer. She spends her life killing vampires, but hopes that this time she'll be able to execute Onigen, the evil patriarch of all vampires. Oh and she makes a little friend along the way.

Clip:

I have been eagerly waiting on news on the next Park Chan Wook film and Thirst (which follows an internally conflicted vampire priest) could really step up next to the flawless work of the directors previous film, Oldboy, based on what path he could take this seemingly pure character down alone.

Thirst follows Sang-hyun, a saddened priest who is obsessed with the unhappiness in society. In hopes of saving at least one life, he participates in an experiment to find a vaccine for the deadly F.I.V. virus in Africa. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong and the priest is infected - but he recovers completely and his church is elated with his new healing abilities. The feeling doesn't last, though, and he relapses and awakens with a thirst for blood and a fear of the sun. If he doesn't drink blood, the F.I.V. symptoms come rushing back, so he steals blood transfusions and lives the life of a vampire. Sang-hyun tries to live a life free from sin but a failed suicide attempt and forbidden attraction to his friends wife lead this new vampire priest down the road plotting murder.

Twitch has a collection of great new stills from Thirst below:



Thirst Footage:



Behind The Scenes:

Cheerleader Camp is a place to make friends and eat the intestines of that bitchy girl from Westside High who stole my boyfriends heart... literally. With her teeth. Ugh, this is such a cute idea, I'm having a hard time deciding which zombie I love more, Nazi zombies or Cheerleader zombies. This low budget film is out on DVD and available for your purchasing pleasure on their official site where you can learn more about our leggy, high kickin' undead squad. The story is pretty self explanatory, cheerleaders turn into zombies at their summer camp, end scene. The trailer and some adorable pictures are below. Thanks to Joblo for filling us in on the release.

Unlike Park's previous mega-hits, like Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Cyborg didn't become a giant box office hit in Korea. But it's doing pretty well in the film festival circuit overseas — it won an award in Berlin, and opened the festival in Hong Kong. It plays next at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on March 15th and 16th. Here's a quick analysis of what I felt were the most unique aspects of this movie:

Characters:
Beginning with overly imaginative, schizophrenic Il-Sun — played by pop heartthrob Rain — the story includes some unforgettable characters you learn to love. There's an elder woman with myth-o-mania, a guy who sewed up his own butt, a guy who fell in platonic love with a calf he was raising, a woman who's obsessed with her skin and her flying socks, and a girl whose dream is to join the Edelweiss Choir. And then there's Young-goon, who is convinced she is a cyborg with a mission to obliterate all "white coats" but isn't quite sure how she's supposed to recharge her batteries (instead of eating lunch, she has a lunch box full of alkaline cells that she sticks in her mouth at mealtimes). "I didn't come with an instruction manual," she says.

Emotional baggage:
Humans have a lot of emotional baggage. Perhaps one of the reasons Young-goon decided she was a cyborg was because she stopped feeling things — or she felt too much and inadvertently turned it all off. We get glimpses of her past, which include a grandmother who was convinced her offspring were all mice and a mother who avoided her child's existential questions by turning to radish. Later, when she finds the secret cyborg manifesto while staying at the hospital, it stipulates that the seven deadly sins for cyborgs are sympathy, thankfulness, hesitation, daydreaming, being sad, restlessness, and feeling guilty. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Il-sun performs a virtual operation on Young-goon, taking away her sympathy and allowing her to attain a full charge and become the killing machine that she was destined to be. It's interesting that this seemingly heartless act is really driven by a very human emotion, vengeance. Meanwhile, Il-sun takes pride in his stealing skills — his parents ignored him so much when he was a kid that he believes he is sometimes invisible.

Seeking comfort in machinery:
Since Young-goon can't relate to other humans, she seeks solace in her conversations with the vending machine and the pay phone, and she takes orders from the mysterious voice coming out of her radio. The nurses can't get her to eat, so at one point in the film, they decide to give her shock therapy. Lying there with hundreds of wires sticking out of the treatment cell they put her in, Young-goon feels right at home. She reveals that she was raised by electrical wires in an incubator. "I feel like I've been born again," she says as the session ends and her toes light up. She walks off her wheelchair, goes upstairs, loads up her ammo, and goes on a full-scale massacre of the evil white coats, storing cartridges in her mouth and dispatching bullets machine gun-style from her dainty fingers.

Here's the totally pop-y trailer: