Theatrical Review: Thirst (2009)

"I'm pretty sure that they're having sex in that poster..."

In Attendance- Me, Machine, and Mrs. Machine.
Cast Members of Note- Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim, Hae-Sook Kim, and Ha-Kyun Shin. Directed by Chan-Wook Park.

A Korean Priest, bored with his routine of saying prayers and hugging altar boys, decides to volunteer himself as a guinea pig to find a cure for a mysterious, killer virus. What a sweet guy, wanting to save lives and end the suffering that he sees all around him, risking death to help the cold, hard, mean world find some warmth... EMO ALERT! That's right, go write a poem about it, Father Weepy! 

At least he doesn't sparkle.

The virus makes him break out in nasty sores and kills him, kinda-sorta, but then suddenly he's alive again, a true miracle of science. Either that, or he received some Vampire blood during a transfusion, and is now one of the living dead! When he takes up with his mentally-retarded cousin's slutty wife, and I mean really slutty wife, they embark on an affair full of sordid sex, armpit licking, guilt, and blood.

The lesson here is that easy chicks always come with baggage... Heavy, heavy baggage.

Can a Vampire Priest exist harmoniously with God and nature? Will his taking up with a filthy whore lead to ruin for all? Don't Priests know that they can't have sex or kill? I won't spoil what happens next for you here, because doing so would mean that I understood it all, but suffice it to say that being a Vampire isn't as fun as True Blood makes it out to be, although it does seem to have its perks. 
  

A sick perk, but a perk none the less.

This isn't the Vampire Opus that I was expecting, but it is fresh and daring, and a really good movie that at least tried something different. Don't get me wrong, it's still plenty bloody, brutal, sexy and even full of wry humor, it just leaned more on character development and a slow build than most vamp flicks tend to. Chan-Wook Park is a fantastic director; if you haven't seen Oldboy yet, you're missing an awesome movie. He does a great job here as well (although he gets a little too philosophically deep with his message, which detracts from the pace/plot a bit), and creates an interesting, nasty, whimsical and intelligent Vampire flick.

She smells like whore.

At 133 minutes, this movie was a tad too long. It didn't drag per se, but it took a while to get going, and I think trimming it a bit would have helped the overall flow of the movie. All in all, it's really a minor complaint, but still...

This 10 minute long scene of him staring was just unnecessary.

I would have let the evil little shrew die, but that's just me.

Either you kill women, or they kill you. Live or die, it's your choice!

This movie is packed with lots o' blood, which is natural since it's a vampire flick.

Oh, the contrast.

This movie is also packed with some odd sexuality and plenty of nudity. It's nothing obscene or gratuitous, but it's there. Oh, it's there... 

This disturbing threesome actually happened.

Some Vampires are actually very nice and value human life. Also, others are insane sluts that love to kill.

Leaning back like he's rich.

In the age of Twilight, True Blood and nameless other watered-down Vampire projects being thrown at us left and right, Thirst is a very good movie (if a tad overlong) which deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. I like feeling respected/appreciated by a filmmaker, as if they want to tell us a fun story and make it mean something beyond just flash and gloss, and this film did that for me. See it now. 

B+

Thirst is available now on DVD and VOD.

Ok-bin Kim is in this.