I figure that I'm lucky if I get one truly great vampire movie every couple of years.  Withthe memory of last year's magnificent Let The Right One In still fresh in my mind, I figured it was too much to ask to have 2009 deliver another stellar addition to the bloodsucker genre.

Unfortunately I was right.  Chan Wook-Park's ( Oldboy , S ympathy For Lady Vengeance ) new film, Thirst , is a fairly interesting vampire movie.  Unfortunately that's just not good enough anymore.

To begin with, the story is more complicated than it needs to be.  Our hero is Sang-hyun(played by the always watchable Kang-ho Song, who seems to have fully embraced his new role as the Korean Christian Bale), a Catholic priest so compelled to help his fellow man that he volunteers to be injected with an experimental vaccine in order to help find a cure for a rare virus.  Everyone who has gone through this procedure has died.  And so does he.

And then the story begins.  Despite being the only person to have survived the procedure, Sang-hyun attempts to go back to his old life, administering last rites to the dying.  Eventually, we discover the reason why he survived: due to the tainted blood he received in a blood transfusion, he's now a vampire.

In this world, vampires are super-strong, drink blood, hate sunlight, and apparently have foot fetishes.

Sang-hyun gets used to his new vampirism reasonably rapidly,while also having to deal with a cult of terminally ill folks who want nothing more than to worship him as their new messiah, a shop girl who wants him to break his vows of celibacy and take her away from her life of boredom, and a blind mentor willing to betray their friendship in order to see again.  And for some reason, he also takes up Mah-jong.

It's all a bit much.  In this movie, as in his past films, Chan-Wook Park seems to desperately want to break every taboo that humanity has ever come up with.  It's worked for him before, but in Thirst he seems to be so eager to push as many of our buttons as he can in a two hour period that he ends up mashing them quickly and half-heartedly, rather than pushing firmly on one or two for a more potent effect.

That being said, this film has plenty of good things to offer, not the least of which is the fantastic performance by Ok-vin Kim, who plays the unpredictably sadistic shop girl Tae-joo.  Tae-joo might be my favourite on screen villain so far this year, though to be fair I haven't seen the Hannah Montana movie yet.

Though Thirst doesn't necessarily fall into the realm of instant classic like Let The Right One In does, it's still a compelling and unique take onthe vampire mythos, by one of the more interesting directors in film today.

Rating: B

P.S. To whom ever wrote the translation used in the English sub-titles shown in the North American theatrical version of this film: "Absolutively" is not a word.

P.P.S. Yes, I'm aware that I've written an entire article about vampire movies without mentioning Twilight.

Message Edited by TimR on 08-09-2009 07:31 PM