Dasepo Naughty Girls (2006) DVD

Take the adolescent song-and-dance of Grease and High School Musical, the cultish eroticism of Eyes Wide Shut, the Swiss adoption-and-incest anxieties of Green Wing, the tentacular teen terror of The Faculty, and the rampant polysexuality of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (or the Internet), and you would have something like Lee Je-yong’s Dasepo Naughty Girls (Dasepo Sonyo), an irrepressibly camp adaptation of the racy Korean on-line comic strip Multi-Cell Girl.

Set in No Use High School, the film follows the growing pains of a student body whose hormonal stirrings and sexual burgeonings are positively encouraged (and exploited) by the teachers – until, that is, such permissiveness is threatened by the authority of the principal who has recently been possessed by a snaky monster. Still, it is nothing that a crotch-thrusting, CG-enhanced ‘Force of Yang’ dance cannot resolve.

Boasting amongst its dramatis personae a transsexual schoolgirl, a masochist teacher and a transvestite gangster, Lee’s film might seem to be a transgressive antidote to the notorious prudery of his native South Korea – but in fact the three main characters here (including, bizarrely, a boy with a single, cyclopean eye) are rigorously straight, sex is often discussed but never actually seen and, significantly, protagonist Poor Girl (Kim Ok-bin) is reduced to teen prostitution while still somehow keeping her virginity intact. Here sex in its different forms and fetishes serves merely to emblematise the spirit of rebellion and otherness that afflicts most adolescents, and the only real taboo on display is the intense social divide between Korea’s haves and have-nots. Poor Girl literally wears Poverty on her back, and there is no doubt that it is economic rather than sexual or even genetic incompatibility that keeps yodelling rich-boy Anthony (Park Jin-woo) at a distance.

Lee’s film is lurid, tacky, anarchic, fast and funny – even if it suffers from an episodic structure that merely introduces ensemble characters without giving them much to do or experience. Viewers with an uncontrollable lust for more should pursue the Dasepo television series that Lee made back-to-back with the feature.

Anton Bitel