Dasepo Naughty Girls

Dasepo sonyo; comedy / satire, South Korea, 2006; D: Lee Jae-yong, S: Kim Ok-bin, Park Jin-woo, Lee Kyeon, Eun-seong, Kim Byeol, Lee Yong-joo, Nam Oh-jeong

No Use High is a center for several bizarre students, among them a poor girl who occasionally works as a prostitute in order to pay for her mother's debts. She is also in love with Anthony, a Swiss Korean who on the other hand has a crush on 'Two Eyes', the hermaphrodite sister of the unpopular one-eyed student Cyclops. When one of her customers drags her out, they both get kidnapped by a sect who wants to sacrifice them to their erotic god, but when the girl starts dancing they release them, and she becomes a dancing star. At the same time, the students battle and defeat a dragon monster that possessed their principal and placed virgin chips on many girls. The girl discovers Anthony may be her long lost brother, but that information turns out to be false. In the end, her class graduates.

In the opening of this film, a substitute teacher enters the class and informs the students that their real teacher was contracted with syphilis after sleeping with a teenage girl. After that, one girl from the class looks around nervously, stands up and says to the teacher that "she has to see her doctor" before quickly and embarrassingly leaving the class. But then a guy, who is obviously her ex-lover, excuses himself and leaves too. After him, another girl leaves, and another guy and then another girl, a few guys ask: "What? You slept with him, too?" until the whole class swiftly disappears, except for one guy, a cyclops, upon which a few pink dancing girls burst into scene and announce the opening credits. Depending upon if you find that opening sympathetic or not, will depend a lot about your view on the entire wacky story of "Dasepo Naughty Girls", a bizarre, off-beat high school satire that's so over-the-top a lot of time that one really feels one has to be an alien in order to understand it properly. The film mostly appeals to the madly satirical side of the viewer, but those viewers who don't have it will probably dismiss it as just one of those crazy junctions between kitsch and grotesque, wondering how the modern Koreans always have to make strange instead of normal films. One really has to wonder how the author who wrote the screenplay wasn't escorted to the mental asylum from the producers at latest when the finale with the giant dragon monster shows up in the story, but some of the gags present in it are so hilarious and irresistibly strange, from the main heroine, the poor girl (excellent Ok Bin-kim) who always wears a grey stuffed puppet on her back (!) as a symbol of poverty, up to the sequence where a teenage guy is chatting with a girl on the Internet and persuading her to show him her intimate photos, but then discovers it was actually his own dad he was accidentally chatting all along (!), that "Dasepo" proves to be an interesting achievement in the manner of some satirical shows in their heyday.

Grade:++