There is something very reassuring about the fact that other countries can make action movies just as dumb Hollywood action movies. The Korean Tube is Die Hard on a subway, another in the long, long, LONG line of movies that can be described as Die Hard in/on a X where X is a social gathering place or mode of transportation.

Our hero is a subway cop called, at least in the crappy subtitles Sony included on the DVD, Jay. He has a sort of love interest in a pickpocket named Kay. And the bad guy is a terrorist who is only ever called T. This movie brought to you by the number 3, and the letters P and U.

T. is a uncatchable super-terrorist, though his reputation as a bad ass is no doubt enhanced by the fact that Korean SWAT teams got all their training from the same place Stormtroopers learn tactics and sharpshooting. There are two scenes where SWAT teams of more than 50 officers have surrounded T. and his tiny band of goons and despite the police being at pointblank range and having all the strategic advantages, T. still manages to shoot his way out, killing dozens of officers each time, and he never gets hit once.

Tube is obviously trying to cover a lot of ground. After an opening massacre in a an airport, T. commandeers a train. Again, the subtitles are a little muddled, but I think all of the following are parts of T.’s motivation for doing this:

- He’s crazy
- He wants to kill a former Prime Minister
- He wants to make public the former Prime Minister’s corruption, in the form of a SD card
- Someone, maybe Jay, killed his wife
- Jay also killed one of his goons at airport
- He’s going to blow up a nuclear plant

Clearly, T. has read The Ten Habits of Successful Psychopaths.

Jay is played by Kim Seok-hun, who wants to be Chow Yun-Fat so bad it makes things dangle out of his mouth. Kay’s character appears to be modeled on Faye Wong’s character in Chungking Express (1994), down to her simulating a relationship with Jay for her own amusement. Not much original here.

The action scenes are well done, though the cannon fodder nature of all the police except Jay cuts into the drama more than little.

“Maybe my motivation’s in here?”

Kim Seok-hun, star of such movies as A Better Day After Tomorrow, Medium Boiled, and God of Pinocle.

So that’s what happened to girl kidnapped in The Host (2006).

Enjoy this? You’ll be seeing it a lot in this movie.

“Shouldn’t one of us fire ba — Never mind.”

Wow, has it really been 13 years since Ghost in the Shell came out? When the 20th anniversary edition of Akira (1988) comes out on Blu-Ray, I’m going to crawl under a rock.

I still love this movie. It’s a strange ode to cyberpunk and existentialism. Having Mamoru Oshii adapt a comic from Masamune Shirow was definitely a weird idea, but I think it works. And the movie is just drop dead gorgeous. There aren’t many animated movies that look as good as this, even today.

On the minus side, I still have trouble following the plot, even after having seen the movie many times. Which one is Section 6 and which is Section 9? Why is there an invisible tank hiding in the natural history museum? How does Kusanagi get away with killing diplomats?

Of course there’s also the dialogue, which requires me to slog through passages like this:

Kusanagi: There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.

But none of that matters compared to intricate cityscapes and captivating trance music.

Ghost in the Shell has inspired a whole cottage industry of quasi-sequel TV series and movies. There’s a couple of those I haven’t seen, so they’ll be showing up here soon. Also, it’s amazing how much of an influence the original Ghost in the Shell had on The Matrix (1999).

“He say you are blade runner…”

Ghost-fu.

Mamoru Oshii’s trademark: The beagle.

In this future, the whole world is Kowloon City.

Spider-Tank, Spider-Tank, doing whatever a Spider-Tank can…

Set in the futuristic year of 1985, manly Capt. Patterson, lothario Lt. Turner, and vaguely ethnic Lt. Cruze are astronauts charged with taking scientist Dr. Conrad to Space Station A. As their ship approaches the station it’s blown up by a mysterious (animated) ray. The ray then catches the spaceship and transports it to Venus. Once there our heroes are captured by the natives, a bunch of gorgeous ray gun-toting, miniskirt-wearing women.

Needless to say our heroes are the only men around, so they get down to business by being about as condescending as is humanly possible. It’s really quite impressive. This movie makes It, The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and King Dinosaur (1955) look like they were written by Betty Friedan. The one scene where the movie almost — almost! — seems to make proto-feminist statement is destroyed by muddled direction. The men discuss the possibility (not proven in any of the men’s eyes despite abundant evidence) that Venus’s masked queen Yllana could actually have the beam weapon that destroyed the station:

Lt. Cruze: How could a bunch of women invent a gizmo like that?

Lt. Turner: And sure, even if they invented it, how could they aim it? You know how women drivers are!

The men then all look kind of confused and wander in different directions. Perhaps they are supposed to be comically repudiating Turner’s attitude, but it doesn’t come across clearly.

Anyhoo, there’s a kind of rebel movement against Yllana on Venus, lead by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Talleah. (To put this in perspective, she was the Paris Hilton of her day, famous for being famous.) The men escape with Talleah and some other women, hide in a cave and make out. Oh, and there’s a little excitement when Turner is attacked by a giant stuffed spider, but that’s about it. The men are recaptured, and Yllana, apparently PMSing, carries out her threat to destroy Earth with the ray, but for some unknown reason the ray machine explodes, killing her. Huh. So our “heroes” could have stayed in the cave making out with the women and everything still would have been OK. The movie ends on the expected comic note that the men are trapped for the next year on a planet of beautiful 18 to 24-year old beauty contest winners, conveniently ignoring that some dialogue earlier in the movie suggested the Venusian men are alive and imprisoned on a space station.

Punch card machines — of the future!!!

What a cast! Joe Don Baker and Vincent Price in the same movie!

Guess who’s the bed-wetter.

As always, 1950s movies manage to put my dreams on celluloid.

“At least they never got pictures of me without my panties!”

“So, how long have you been dating the Joker?”

On the list of embarrassing ways to die, this has to be pretty high up.

Pillow fight!