Movie Reviews
Dasepo Naughty Girls at the Fantasia Film Festival
By Al Kratina
July 9, 2007 - 11:19

Dasepo Naughty Girls

2006, South Korea

Director: LeeJae-Yong

Writer: LeeJae-Yong

Cast: Kim Ok-Bin, Park Jin-Woo, Lee Kyean

Producers: Ahn Dong-Gyu

Genre: Comedy

Rating: Not yet rated

Running Time: 103 minutes

Distributor: Mirovision

Web: www.dasepogirl.com

All of us over the age of 14 are sick of teen sex comedies. Since There’s Something About Mary, countless American comedies, many of them appearing to be based entirely around a single unpleasant semen joke, have been filling theatres, and I for one was certainly getting tired of them. Until, that is, I saw Dasepo Naughty Girls, a South Korean sex comedy based on a web comic that played at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival this Saturday. After the heady mix of bright colors and bizarre sense of sexuality permeating the film, I now realize how easy we Westerners have had it.

It’s not that Dasepo Naughty Girls is bad, it’s just weird. There are laughs a plenty, but all of them are uncomfortable, the kind that make you look around to make sure your mother isn’t standing in the doorway. And while there is no nudity, there sure is more inserting of green ‘revirginization’ chips into young girl’s genitals than I remember from films like American Pie. Dasepo Naughty Girls takes place at No Use High school, where nearly every student is infected with syphilis, and that’s not the half of it. There’s a Cyclops with a beautiful, transgendered sister, an evil spirit that needs to be defeated by masturbation, and Poverty Girl, a young woman who tries to work off her mother’s debt by joining a gangster in dressing up like Sailor Moon and gossiping about boys. Throw in some bizarre musical numbers, complete with Karaoke friendly subtitles, and a young man have having cyber-sex with his father, and you have a subversive but just plain uncomfortable sex comedy. Director LeeJae-Yong keeps things colorful and fast-paced, but you can’t outrun strange, and he doesn’t even try.

Rating: 5 on 10

alkratina@comicbookbin.com