As the film opens, we are introduced to a motley crew of main characters: Wine-sipping arrogant ass Seok-hyun (Lee Je-hoon, Architecture 101), a parapsychologist with a Ph.D; Master Park (cult actor Kim Soo-ro, Vampire Cop Ricky), a professional exorcist and a showboating scam artist; his friend and defrocked Buddhist priest Shim-in (Kwak Do-won, Yellow Sea), who can see supernatural beings with his left eye; Seung-hee (Kim Yoon-hye), an ice princess psychic profiler with zero tolerance for stupid clients; Wol-gwang (Yang Kyung-mo, The Haunters), a kid clairvoyant who talks like Yoda. They are recruited by a big-business interest to “clean up” Uljin, a coastal town known as the Bermuda Triangle of Korea, of malevolent psychic forces. Joined by ace reporter Chan-young (Kang Ye-won, Haeundae), with a personal connection of her own to the haunted town, they end up stirring the wrath of an evil spirit who has the town under its, ah, ectoplasmic thumb.
Ghost Sweepers is the third feature film directed by Shin Jung-won, following the crude but strangely affecting To Catch a Virgin Ghost and the indescribable Chaw. Which means that those who have seen these films should have a good idea of what they are getting into. One thing that might clue the profoundly wackoid nature of this motion picture to those who have not, is the fact that this film’s premise was derived from a real life (?!) incident in which a group of Korean fortune-tellers and psychics in a rented bus got collectively possessed by spirits while passing by a location in Thailand. As it turned out, this location was famous for inexplicable traffic accidents. This possessed-psychics-in-a-tour-bus episode is actually in the first quarter of the movie, and is a fine set-piece, equal parts exciting, suspenseful, hilarious and, well, ridiculous beyond belief. Indeed, the whole movie is like Ren and Stimpy meets The Big Bang Theory by way of David Lynch and Mario Bava, but minus the self-consciously artistic touches that characterize other pop-culture-inflected, candy-colored surrealist “horror” films such as Obayashi Nobuhiko’s House (1977).
Unlike Chaw, which risked alienating a sizable portion of viewers who expected a normal horror film, Ghost Sweepers, based as it is on the well-worn template of Ghostbusters and other supernatural comedy-thrillers, is easier to wrap your brain around… but not by much. Like Shin’s previous films, the narrative lurches, hiccups and takes whatever detours necessary to bring in more character details and colorful episodes. The busy hand-held camerawork and the equally frenetic music score he employs this time, and other seeming concessions to the contemporary genre trends, are not very effective and in fact detract from the film’s charms.
On the other hand, Shin Jung-won has lost little of his unique sensibility, which is put to best use in creating drop-dead funny, strangely persuasive and ultimately attractive characters. Kim Soo-ro is the perfect lead, a robustly charismatic presence who can be uproarious just doing a goofy martial arts routine by himself. Shin also unfurls some surprising relationships among the main characters, which would strike one as snickeringly fake in any realistic setting, but Lee Je-hoon, Kang Ye-won and other members of the cast somehow make them all work. The romantic attraction between the two, despite the manic comedy through which it is articulated, never feels strained. Equally original (if not really profound) is the portrayal of the head villain, the “revelation” of whose true identity is one of the film’s best gags.
This being a Shin Jung-won film, of course, the ratio of knee-slappingly funny gags to what-the-heck-was-that head-scratching moments in Ghost Sweepers is around one to 2.5. As was the case with Chaw, if you have no tolerance for the kind of don’t-ask-I-have-no-idea “quirky stuff” in a genre film (Seung-hee trying to bait a feral dog with cheese sticks [?] she is carrying around like ammunition [?!]; a long, slow motion take of Seok-hyun jumping into the ocean to save his paramour, which makes him look like a electrocuted frog spinning in the air), studiously avoid this film. To others with more adventurous tastes, it is enthusiastically recommended.
Shin Jung-won made a name for himself in music videos before working as a visual supervisor/effects artist on Yoon Je-gyun’s Sex Is Zero (2002) and Romantic Assassins (2003). He made a splash with his feature debut How to Catch a Virgin Ghost (2004), an unusual mix of horror and black comedy that rode positive word-of-mouth to a box office score of 2 million admissions. His second feature Chaw (2009), about a giant wild boar that terrorizes a rural village, solidified his reputation for mixing the bizarre, horrific and hilarious. Ghost Sweepers was released in October 2012 and sold roughly 1 million tickets at the box office.
Kyu Hyun Kim