Film School Flopped: Harpy (2000)

Harpy (South Korea, 2000)

Rating: *

Starring: Lee Jung-hyun, Kim Rae-won, Ggoch-ji Kim

When a movie starts with a film class meeting where you could barely comprehend what the teacher is saying because the chatter from his students can be heard along his little talk, or the damn thing pauses randomly for the sake of creative editing, you know friggin' well this isn't gonna end good for any of us.

While working on an amateur slasher flick for a school project, shy musical prodigy Su-yeon (Lee Jung-hyun) falls for the motorbike-riding bad boy Hyeon-su (Kim Rae-won), who just so happens to be dating the class queen bee Yae-rim (Ggoch-ji Kim). As you would expect from a love triangle, drama and intrigue ensue, especially after someone begins to stalk Su-yeon and Hyeon-su with a camera after the two start seeing each other in secret. Photos of the meet-up are soon passed around school and Yae-rim, of course, isn't too pleased to know that her squeeze is squeezing another girl behind her back, so she corners and attacks Su-yeon at their classroom after spotting her working late one night, only for us to see another figure walking in to kill off the attacked girl no soon after. 

Or at least that's what it looked like as, a few days passed being absent, Su-yeon reappears looking rather okay despite the whole assault, much to Yae-rim's surprise and uneasiness. Su-yeon does appear to be quieter than usual, though, but with her being back on board, the film class can now proceed with their hack' n slash movie project and visit a remote villa where they'll be filming. This is when the shoot goes South for the gang as not only would they discover their props tampered with to cause actual harm, but someone dressed up as their balaclava-clad villain starts hunting them down one by one...

Now, see, Harpy (2000) here had the potential to be at least a serviceable enough murder mystery despite its sappy love triangle one hour act and often wonky characters. It's not a perfect plot, you can actually tell the twist from afar, but it at has the spirit of a passable yet fun B-grade slasher that you could catch whenever nothing else is good to watch on a weekend afternoon. This would have been the case if only, ONLY it wasn't edited into a schizophrenic dreck by people I assume were suffering from a mental breakdown. Or were high. Or both.

Basically, any sense of a stable direction was completely lost within all the noise and stylistic visuals our editor from hell decided to give this film, filling Harpy (2000) with a gobblecock of cartoon noises, randomized freeze frames and slowmo shots, odd voice overs spouting the most random shite here and there, apparently as a way to market this movie as a "horror comedy" in which, from what I read looking into this mess, wasn't even supposed to be the case. Based on what I can properly decipher, it was shot as a (mostly) straight slasher, but the added bells and whistles transformed it into an art house film experiment of the chaotic kind, one that failed to explain its own jokes or reward our patience with worthwhile entertainment. If anything, the whole shtick may have alienated it audience considering its sad box office performance and its relative obscurity. I wouldn't be surprised if none of the people who watched this could make head nor tail of what they're seeing here.

Harpy (2000) is, without a doubt, an experience. Just not a good one. Undoubtedly one of the strangest slasher titles I've seen out there, as well as, sadly, one of the more frustrating to sit through... 

Bodycount:

1 female beaten, stabbed with knife offscreen 

1 male snared with a chained grappling hook, later found hanging dead from a ceiling

1 female strangled with a chained grappling hook

1 female stabbed in the back

1 female stabbed in the chest with a dagger

1 male gets a knife pushed into his throat (mostly offscreen)

1 male knifed to death

1 male strangled to death with a chained grappling hook

Total: 8