Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009)

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The initial tableaux: A short tale is told of demons being contained by a flute being played. It was to be played for 3000 consecutive days, but the player miscounted.So we have a comedy.The monsters get loose and take possession of the flute. Transfers of mastery among humans fails repeatedly.The incomplete Tao wizard Woo-Chi causes a lot of trouble to obtain the obtain the flute. His master saves his neck and gets the flute. A second master, Hwa-dam, fights him for the flute, which is broken in the process. Since it is split, perhaps the monsters will be contained.The master of Woo-Chi is killed by Hwa-dam, but Woo-Chi is blamed for it. He is cursed to imprisonment for 500 years, and awakens in the present. The break occurs at 46 minutes into the 135 minute film.We switch to current times; the monsters are present, the flute is still broken.Delineation of conflicts: The monsters would like to be free and remain free using the restored flute. The guardians, or whatever, of the flute free Woo-Chi from his prison inside a painting. He is not interested in defeating the monsters and restoring the flute. The guardians, the Shin-shun, work on his ego, which has plenty of soft spots. The monsters try to kill all of them to get the two pieces of the flute.There's a subplot about a young woman whom Woo-Chi meets in the past. He also thinks he meets her again in the present. This was not done well at all, but got all too many minutes of screen time.Resolution: Who cares?

I caught this movie on Netflix. Had never heard about it before, and was pleasantly surprised. The characters are deep, the dialogue is fun, the action is fantastic, the story great, and the special effects OK. Most impressive of all was the solid acting, especially during the final fight sequence. Lovely stuff.This movie brings me back in time, into a dark movie theater, at the very end of 'The Matrix', back in 1999. It had such a promising ending, and then they announced sequels that turned out to be poor.Even though 'Woochi' is not a sequel to 'The Matrix', it feels like a movie that successfully went where those sequels didn't go. Highly recommended for those who enjoy fantasy, action, and a bit of time travel.

A film with time travelling Goblin Rabbits trying to steal a pipe that will….I don't know what. This is Asian cinema at its best. A story built on eastern story telling. Young buck, wise old master, humorous sidekick (who may or may not be a dog of indeterminate gender) and a love interest with guts and gumption when needed most.Following the apprentice Wizard Woochi (Don Wong-Kan) and his shape shifting Dogberry-esque friend Chorangyi and their hunt for the magic that will make Woochi's name and Chorangyi human.Fight scenes of inventiveness that take the stylistic quirks of the later Matrix films and make them great, comedic timing and watch out for the reality of magic in the second act (21st century) as we find out what would really happen if you had to seek out a magic painting at two in the morning in downtown Pyongyang.Betrayal, magic, drunken Taoist gods who can't seem to get anything right and a downbeat upbeat ending that wraps the film up in the brilliance of the eponymous hero's own imagination.This is a film for teenagers, lovers of story and people who don't take themselves seriously.Big bag of popcorn.

+ A good mix between classic Wu-Xiapian movies and time-travel humor. It never fails to deliver laughs or to impress with witty action. Scrolls, seals, ideograms and magic tricks dispensed by the terrific cast are used to serve both the action and the comic relief. No flashy CGI it's cool and discrete. (The audience burst in laughs when they did the old school 'white smoke' metamorphosis trick.)The film lacks a good editing though (a recurrent handicap in Korean movies). Despite the great acting of the cast, it tends to slow down when trying to develop the very secondary female characters. This is probably due to the presence of many Korean movie stars who always insist to get a lot of screen time for their characters even if that doesn't serve the storyline.I'll give it a 8 because of all the good laughs and this very refreshing and magical atmosphere the movie provides. While Korea's grown famous for pushing to export crappy CGI movies out of sheer patriotism but this isn't one of them. Woochi actually delivers.