Mutual Mutilation

Here’s a fun and educational thing to do: watch an insurance adjuster process fraudulent claims! (OK, I’m being a smidge douche-y here, but work with me.) Jeon Jun-oh is an insurance investigator who checks out people who kill their own family members for cash. That’s probably not a cool thing to do.

Once such guy is filing a claim on behalf of his son’s suicide. The police won’t help Jeon prove it was a murder for some silly reason. And the movie drags on and on. Then something horribly fun happens. Arms are put under industrial paper cutters. Eyes and mouths are stitched up without anesthetic. Stabbings occur to the stomach area. Keys get plunged into eyeballs. Black House (aka, Geomeun jip/2007) is way dull until the last ten minutes, then all holy WTF breaks loose.

The weird guy whom Jeon thought was trying to collect the insurance money was actually acting weird for a reason: someone cut off his arms! No more pouring your own cereal. Jeon’s girlfriend gets abducted because he’s too close to THE TRUTH. A quick search leads him to a veritable human slaughter house that’d give the guy in Saw (2004) a warm fuzzy feeling in his tummy.

The plot is sluggish (made even more tedious with the Korean sub-titles) and stretching things. (People killing people for insurance money? Come on — that stuff doesn’t happen in real life.) But the ending sequence is deliciously gruesome with body parts laying around like festive decorations and such. And I mean that in a delightful way.