For the New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center, I was keen to see the one with sneak-attack breakdancers but swayed instead to see Dasepo Naughty Girls. I must give naughty girls an edge over sneak-attack breakdancers. And without breaking a sweat, Dasepo should qualify as the strangest movie I will see this year.
Let’s see: it’s a candy-colored teen sex-comedy/soap opera/musical, kind of like if you captured Baz Luhrmann, Porky’s and Grease in a sack and ran it through the “English to Korean” filter on Babel Fish.
Among the horny students and teachers at No-Use High School are a poor girl forced into prostitution who becomes best friends with her first john, a paunchy middle-aged cross-dresser. He’s uninterested in sex but obsessed with putting on makeup and schoolgirl outfits to pose for cellphone snapshots, giggle and gossip about boys; later he becomes the girl’s manager for her sudden and unexpected musical career. There’s another student with one eye who has a transgender sister (brother?). And there’s a teacher who likes getting spanked. Frequently the characters break into song, the Korean lyrics highlighted syllable-by-syllable across the bottom of the screen, just like in karaoke.
The reptilian-eyed principal brainwashes the class into model students while restoring their long-lost virginity. At the showdown conclusion, a Medusa-like dragon-lady emerges from the principal to smite the students, but they gather and use the cosmic power of group masturbation to defeat her. Then everyone assembles in the gym and starts dancing.
I’d say there was something lost in translation but, no, I think Dasepo Naughty Girls is just that weird.