Thirst

A rollicking, hysterical splatter-sex-comedy only confirms 'Thirst' as one of the year's more extreme, enjoyable entertainments.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed.

Thirst is a grim antidote to the sanitized, pale young things of Twilight, Supernatural and True Blood.

Thirst begins with great intellectual and artistic promise, then devolves into a repetitious mess of teeth, blades, necks, bites, arterial sprays, sex, sex, sex and death.

Thirst keeps coming up against the limitations of its various inspirations like a bumper car on a crowded court. On almost every other level, the film's audaciously entertaining, at times even quite moving. You just have to have the stomach for it.

Park aficionados are assured their fix of lurid imagery and baroque plotting, though straight-up horror buffs may get restless during the sluggish and murky middle section; Twilight fans need not apply.

My affection for Thirst has mostly to do with the performance of Kim Ok-vin as Tae-ju, a sullen household slave who's transformed into a ravenous, punishing bloodsucker.

Kiddie shows like Twilight and Blood: The Last Vampire pale (you'll excuse the expression) in comparison.

Boldly erotic and playfully ponderous about sins of the flesh, "Thirst" rips open its bodice, and various veins, with arterial sprays of carnage and carnality. It's a savage, frank, fanged fusion of "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice."

Perhaps no auteur is as suited to the vampire genre as South Korean director Park Chan-wook, a man who has made a career out of films full of sexual perversity, doomed romances and a seemingly insurmountable volume of blood.

The degrees of shock, the foreshadowing and throwbacks throughout (both visual and in dialogue) all seem diminutive next to the amazing performances by the male and female lead.

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