The Girl With the Butterfly Tattoo

Over the years we've released some pretty strange movies here at Mondo Macabro. But this might very well be the strangest yet. Directed by Kim Ki-young, director of the original version of THE HOUSEMAID, often called "the best Korean film of all time", BUTTERFLY is a horror-tinged psychotropic melodrama freak-out about nothing less than death itself and the will to keep living. After a young man survives being poisoned by a girl at a picnic he falls into a deep, suicidal depression. But standing in the way of his desire to kill himself is a Nietzschean bookseller who refuses to die even though he's killed several times, an ancient mummy who is revived in the form of a beautiful woman who happens to be a cannibal, and an insane anthropologist who wants to keep his daughter alive by getting her laid. And also, of course, butterflies. KILLER BUTTERFLY is the most eccentric work in the filmography of the very eccentric Kim Ki-young, made at time of crisis in the Korean film industry when he was running out of hit movies but not bizarre ideas.