Paradise Villa Ws & Subtitled (Ws Sub Dol)

Customer Reviews:

Interesting developing story........2007-05-21

This is an interesting movie to watch. Although it is just typical thriller movie. This is much better than perfect stranger with Hollywood super star. The movie like a play made on film. Everything happens in the villa or the hotel. I borrowed it from a public library, so it is good to watch.

Yikes!.......2006-05-13

***spoilers**

O.K., where to begin? Oh, right...the premise. Considering what it is, it won't take long to set the stage. Paradise Villa opens in a gamer's cafe (before gaming cafes were cool), filled to the brim with keyboard slapping teens. We settle on one kid, Sumusal, as his PC crashes. When he gets his game back online, his character has lost all of it's power and all of it's weapons. Or more precisely, they've been hijacked. This doesn't sit well with him.

The main stage is an apartment building packed with quite the strange array of tenants. We've got the building caretaker, the Parks, a young couple with a baby, an older couple that can't get along and the husband is apparently screwing around with another, younger tenant. We have a couple of porn-star wannabes, and many more. This is where our "protagonist" ends up later that day to look for the hijacker he only knows as Viagra. That's right, Viagra. The building's residents have turned their attention to the Soccer World Cup game between Japan and Korea, so they're completely oblivious as to what is roaming the hallways and stairwells.

I can hardly fault Park for using such an attractive cast, but when one scene erupts into a full-blown, multi-position free-for-all, I wonder how seriously Park took the movie in the first place. Paradise Villa's owner, (also named Mr. Park) is summoned home by a couple of young peeping tom tipsters about his woman getting her freak on with another guy. Mr. Park busts in on them in mid crescendo and during a fray with the guy, Mr. Park gets crowned and dies. As this is going on, Sumusal is in some kind of trance as he's going from apartment to apartment looking for Viagra and also busts into a home and stabs a woman a few times in the stomach.

That's only the beginning...

What's soon evident as the killing progresses is that all but the first couple can almost be attributed to his search for Viagra, Rather than being opportunistic, they're killing for the sake of killing...and it gets boring very fast. He begins to go to absurd lengths (as does the cheating couple) to perpetuate their respective courses of action. Here, it doesn't work at all. Instead of plot or character development (I'll acknowledge that there are too many characters to develop them), Park resorts with toilet shots and crude voyeurism to hold the viewer's attention . In one particularly confusing scene, Sumusal is well into his spree where he happens to kill one of the young residents who is retrieving a tiny camera that's been stashed to spy on his porn-star neighbor. As Sumusal sits there with the freshly dead kid, he asks it if he's Viagra. After he's dead! Then, through voyeuristic-style camera work on Park's behalf, proceeds to spoon the dead porn-star. You can't make that stuff up; nor would you want to. The movie wraps up as 'gamer kid' hears a ring tone melody that snaps him out of 'serial killer mode'. He washes himself clean of all the blood and leaves.

Whatever message writer/director Park had in mind for Paradise Villa is completely buried by the sub-B Movie violence and sexual content. I can barely decipher what I construed to be a 'technology is corrupting youth' theme, but anyone would be hard pressed to believe Paradise Villa was trying to say anything at all. It does however receive good marks for a consistent timeline, generally decent camerawork and good marks for using the entire building as a set. That keeps things a bit fresher than they might otherwise be. The main problem is, again, that it's just "there". It takes itself too seriously to be considered a slasher, too dry to make it as camp (where it might have had a fighting chance), and too base to be considered drama. And it's not funny. It doesn't have a home. So I was left detached and unconvinced.

DVD:

DVD

DVD