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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Information Exchange  |  Movie Reviews  |  The Man who Was Crushed to Death by Money (1971) « previous next »
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Author Topic: The Man who Was Crushed to Death by Money (1971)  (Read 1749 times)
gerecter
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« on: April 19, 2011, 04:18:26 AM »

"The Man who Was Crushed to Death by Money (Don-e nullyeo jug-eun sana-i, 돈에 눌려 죽은 사나이, 1971)" is a Korean comedy film made in 1971. The main character is played by Bongseo Goo, who is generally regarded as the best living Korean comedian of all time. And he was actually very popular back in 60s and in 70s. But, this film is cheap. I mean this film is both dramatically cheap and technically cheap. You can see some scenes blown out and some flickering cuts that make the story not understandable. Sometimes, you can not even see what is happening. This is just because bad editing and primitive technique of camera. It has all the quality of "trash movie" in 70s/80s' Korean film industry: Film makers hire a popular actor, make a movie as quickly as they can, and frustrate the viewers, but make some money anyway.

But on the other hand, some part of this movie is funny. Some scenes are ruined, but the most part of the movie can be understood, because they are very easy scenes. The movie makers of this movie seem to have known what they were working on. They did not try to make some complicated difficult artistic work. They shot just humble and simple scenes. This might be boring idea, however it is good solution for bad editing/camera technique of this film.

Let's see what the movie looks like. The first thing that you can see is one man suggesting a big amount of the money to our main character, played by Bongseo Goo. He is an old man in this film. He has his small farm. One day, a land dealer comes and wants to buy his small farm. This dealer wants to own the land for a big development project. The main character accepts the deal, and he now gets a great amount of money. He dose a secne which literally crushed by money.

This is the prologue of the movie. You might think it is a ridiculous and mindless scene, but this was the only one scene that makes even small amount of sense. This scene is at least watchable, understandable, dramatic, and dynamic. You can understand the story and it looks like a story about much money. What I am trying to say is all the other scenes in this movie do not have any of these.

After the title sequence, which shows the names drawn by coins, the main character and his wife suddenly complain about their life. What they say is they do not have any child. Then, the wife makes a suggestion to solve this problem. You think of something like a test tube baby? Wrong. Then you might think of adoption. But it is wrong, too. What this wife in the movie says to his husband is to get a young mistress to have his baby.

What is this? She is not like his wife. Instead, she is like a bad masculine friend of the main character. There is no good explanation. Actually there is no explanation of why the wife recommends a mistress to her husband at all. The main character, of course, refuses this solution at first. However, because this is about getting "a young sexy mistress", he accepts this after a while. Now he lives with his mistress.

The problem is that he turns out to be too old and too weak to have a baby. Now the movie starts its main story. It is his adventure or his journey to find a viagra like medicine to succeed in their mistress-and-baby plan. Of course, this is 70s and there is no viagra. What they try to do is hilarious enough to confuse the viewers, and at the same time, to make the viewers laugh. What I mean is this movie is nothing to do with money or a sudden fortune. It is just a movie about hilarious ways to overcome impotency.

Then what are those ways? There are two employees who work for a company that the main character owns. These two guys are rivals. They fight each other to give a better, more effective, more satisfying solution to the main character. One guy is making some serum out of all the odd animals, that include snake, mole, crake, and etc. The main character drinks all the serum, but it dose not work. The other guy brings a mysterious syringe shot called "de-po". It sounds like a short nickname of "depomedrol", and it also sounds like a Korean word meaning "big gun". The main character feels hopeful when he hears of this "big gun syringe shot", which sounds powerful enough. But it also fails.

After a series of failures, the main character decides to use "a secret recipe of the ancient emperor". It is making a medicine out of "balls". The main character hires two guys who agree to sell one ball per one person. This is hilarious and cheap, but the worse (I mean, the better) is one of the guy is played by top comedian, Youngchoon Seo and the other guy is played by top actor, Jang-gang Heo, who was very famous for his roles of serious bad guys in 60s' and 70s' Korean film. These two odd choices of actors add some more hilarious factor to scenes with "a secret recipe of the ancient emperor".

The other things that the main character tries are getting famous doctors. The first employee recommends an European doctor called, "The Strong King", and the second employee recommends a Chinese doctor called, "The Great Stamina". "The Strong King" is introduced as a doctor of a famous French guy, Casanova. (Casanova was actually Spanish/Italian.) and "The Great Stamina" is introduced as a guy who has studied only "this job" for 10 straight years in a deep hidden mountain valley. In fact, they are just desguised quacks. Actually they are two guys who sold their balls to the main character.

The Strong King uses a computerized machine to put some power to the main character. The machine looks really cheap and unrealistic in the movie. However the secne in the movie makes speaking of "unrealistic" to be meaningless, because The Strong King says: this is a nuclear-powered-stamina-enhancer. Combining a concept of nuclear power and a sexul enhancer is one hilarious idea to make a joke. It is sensless and stupid but it makes person laugh.

On the other hand, "The Great Stamina" uses some Yin-Yang theory. He puts the main character into a very cold bath tub and into a very hot bath tub, repeatedly. The result is that the both quaks fail. And the main character criticizes  them. He orders them to cooperate together.

The final solution that the two try is mixing the everything introduced in the movie. You can see the most typical explosion of bad scientific experiment in the world of old worn-out comedy. Anyway, they get some part of the resulted product. The main character finally drinks this final mixture.

The final part of the movie goes way far. It breaks the logic of the movie. The logic of this movie is already broken enough, but the last part of the movie breaks it again in a new different dimension.
It is like this:

The main character turns into a crazy maniac or a monster who can not control his enormous power. He can not stand his power, and the movie informs this situation, by showing a scene of the main character breaking a random rod without any reason. There is a few more random scenes that show his enormous power. One of them is eating a "clock" without any reason. In this movie, eating a clock represents too much sexual power. It is one hilarious moment that anyone can not see often.

But the hilarious factor goes even further. The next scene is the crazy main character trying to attack wives of the two employees. The two wives are scared, and they try to think of some good way to escape from this situation.

One of the wives suddenly says, they need to slow down this maniac. O.K. but how? What she suggests is:

"Let's dance to slow him down."

And they suddenly begin to dance!

How can their dance slow the crazy maniac? And why dose this woman think of "dancing" out of nowhere? And what dose make the other woman to agree to this dancing idea? Nobody knows. This is the most hilarious moment of the entire movie.

The next scene is ruined by bad editing. We can not see what the exact situation after that. Only thing that we can guess is that the main character hurt some people. The main character is now normal again, and he regrets. He feels very sorry. Now he tries to kill himself.

How? Hanging by the neck? No. Shooting with a gun? No. Eating a toxic pill? No. Jumping off the building? No. What the main character dose to kill himself is "putting a belt of dynamite sticks on" to blow himself. He is crying and trying to light up the dynamite sticks. Then, the two employees come, and try to suggest another new idea. Suddenly, he turns into the crazy maniac with enormous power again, and the two employees run away.

The last crazy maniac transformation turns out to be fake. It was desgusing. It was just for driving the two employees out. Nobody tells anything about the reason why he is doing this odd thing to avoid his own employees. He might hate them. But he is the boss. He could just fire them.

Anyway, after all these mindless moments, the last conclusion is a happy ending which shows the smiling old wife and the main character, saying "we, just two of us, can be happy without any child" to his old wife.

The point of this film is showing ridiculously twsting story told in mind blowing way. This makes viewers shocked. This makes viewers silly. But it is very, very, mind blowing and ridiculous at the same time. The viewers will feel like to see the end of the hilariousness. This makes the viewers watch this film till its end. This is the funny point of the film.

The comedians in this film were not that bad at their jobs. They are good at giving funny faces. Some of them are very good at impersonating. For example, Youngchoon Seo, the most famous Korean comedian of that time, is amazing when he is impersonating a Chinese doctor. It is like Peter Sellers. Some hilarious things in the movie turn into actual jokes by these good comedians. Not good jokes, but funny enought to make you feel curious what will happen next.

One more thing. In this movie, you can see the people in the movie usually talk slowly. Too slowly, it seems to be strange. The reason of the slow speed of talking is that they did their voice dubbing for the entire movie. Not using real-time synchronous recording reduced  the cost of making movie. And they wanted to synchronize the dubbed sound to the moving lips of the actors without any difficulty. This is the reason why all the talk were very slow in the trash movies in 70s' and 80s' Korean movie.
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gerecter
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« Reply #1 on: April 19, 2011, 04:23:08 AM »

The blog post of this review with some screen shots is: oddfilm dot blogspot dot com.
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