Pop. Culture. Shock. I’ve been writing for this website for several years without giving a lot of thought to the title: PopCultureShock. That is, until last month when I saw the film Aachi & Ssipak in the New York Asian Film Festival. On July 4th, ladies and gentlemen, I truly felt the shock of pop culture.

Aachi & Ssipak hits you like a cartoon brick wall to the head, and it keeps hitting you with Acme dynamite until the end of the film. With at least three times the body count of Frank Miller’s 300 as so eloquently put in Ain’t it Cool News‘ legendary review of 300, Aachi & Ssipak is like: “…hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.”

Remember in the mid-nineties, when watching anime meant seeing obscure, often mature ultra-violent, yet extremely well-animated cartoons from Japan? Aachi & Ssipak is like the Korean equivalent of that feeling, except it’s funnier, and it mocks Hollywood in the process.

Aachi & Ssipak is a movie about millions of blue, smurf-like, pikmen-esque mutants getting blown up, torn limb-from-limb, and killed twenty at a time. It’s about a caricature of the Terminator–only he’s like, 10,000 times more deadly than the Terminator. It’s a film about two low-life street kids named Aachi and Ssipak (Aachi meaning “bum” in Korean and “Ssipak” is a swear word). It’s about a washed up porno director who gets used to make Aachi and Ssipak into high-rolling druglords. It’s about an evil little girl who looks like Stewie from Family Guy running the military like an evil dictators. It’s about a mad scientist sewing dead bodies together for tomorrow’s super-soldiers. It’s about a cliche of a cliche of a girl, a porn star named Beauty who gets a cybernetic anal implant that makes her super-rich every time she goes to the bathroom.

The festival blurbs about Aachi & Ssipak that you can find on the internet are a summary of the backstory and most of them run like this: In the future, human excrement has become a valuable fuel source. People who excel at excreting in government port-a-potties are rewarded with government issued popsicles, which are laced with a mild euphoric drug. The popsicles, called “juicy bars” have created addicts, and retarded blue mutants who are unable to defecate but are born addicted to juicy bars. The blue mutants, called “Diaper Gangs” are a constant danger to the normal human population, because of the frequent attacks to steal juicy bars.

This description does not do the film justice.

Aachi & Ssipak may sound like a horrible movie, a movie no one would want to see or distribute in North America. Aachi & Ssipak flopped at the Korean box office, and was scoffed at by critics. Although these signs point to disaster, I’d like to take a moment to assure film distribution companies (*cough* *cough* MediaBlasters *cough*) that Aachi & Ssipak will one day be a cult hit in America. I would buy a copy of the DVD to blow people’s minds at parties.

Aachi & Ssipak boasts unbelievably high quality animation. The film took eight years to make, and uses the latest in animation technology. 2-D blends seamlessly with 3-D (it’s comparable to the Tekkonkinkrete film). All the scenes are fully animated without any of the cost-cutting cheap-looking crap you get in current TV anime coming out of Japan.

In one scene, I noticed CG was being used to move the camera (it wasn’t that obvious) and I thought, “Why is this such an expensive-looking shot?” Then I realized the camera was being moved to chop of the heads of a few dozen mutants in a complicated set-up. Perhaps you and I can sleep better at night, knowing that somewhere in Korea, a team of people worked for weeks animating a technically accurate and very artistic multiple-beheading scene. They were doing it just for you, dear reader, and they were probably using government money.

Aachi & Ssipak up the ante on the “ultra-violence” of A Clockwork Orange. It redefines bad taste.

Aachi & Ssipak is what would happen if Ralph Bakshi had an enormous budget, eight years, and high-end technology. If that horrifies you, don’t bother watching the film. But if you’re a die hard Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation fan, you’ll want to see out Aachi & Ssipak like it’s going out of style.

The Koreans who saw the film with us quickly explained that the English subtitles had not been entirely accurate. In Korean, Aachi and Ssipak are swearing constantly, including using racial slurs. “It’s like South Park,” the two Korean women explained. I can only imagine that the subtitle track played down the language so the film could be shown at festivals around the world.

The only other feature length Korean animated film I have seen is Wonderful Days, sometimes called Sky Blue. The Korean government funds some animated projects, including Wonderful Days. Perhaps because of grant money, Wonderful Days is terribly boring to watch. There are some beautiful sequences of animation, but there are also experimental shots that go nowhere. There is nothing distinctly Korean about Wonderful Days. The character designs looked like anime. Aachi & Ssipak has delightful character designs that are unique to the film.

Getting back to the pop culture shock; Aachi & Ssipak is comparable to getting hit in the face with a machine gun firing pop culture, and when you look closely at the bullet shells they say “Made in America”.

Central to Aachi & Ssipak are parodies of American action movies, as well as Hong Kong action flicks. There is a long Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mine-car sequence, as well as a machine-gun firing doves-in-a-church nod to John Woo movies. In one scene Aachi and Ssipak heavily drug their porno director friend and force him to watch Hollywood movies on DVD. When the director is spaced out and can no longer tell reality from fiction, he re-enacts the shoot out from Taxi Driver followed by a scene from Aliens. Later in the film Misery and Basic Instinct are parodied. Other critics noticed references to Ishtar and Battleship Potemkin.

When I was in Korea, I noticed one channel on the major networks that aired American movies, 24 hours a day. Can you imagine such a channel (on network TV, not cable) here in America? What if the channel line-up was: ABC, NBC, Fox, and KTV, all Korean movies all the time? It’s unimaginable to most Americans. We produce so much content for TV and movies here in the States that the average American rarely watches a foreign film. What if the top grossing movie at the box office in America week after week were Chinese? What if 24 were as big of a hit as it is, but it were made in another country?

Both Aachi & Ssipak and the recent British film Hot Fuzz tackle the question: What’s it like to have some other country’s pop culture shoved down your throat at the local super market every day? Instead of Bad Boyz II on sale at Walmart for $8, what if it were A Better Tomorrow part II? And what if you consume way too much of that sweet, sweet foreign pop culture?

I picture it like this:

Aachi & Ssipak is like watching a foreigner vomit your culture back at you. It’s a kind of a compliment, and a kind of insult. The makers of Aachi & Ssipak are participating in a mocking homage. One feels as if we’ve been dumping DVDs into Korean waters, inadvertently polluting brains for fifty years or more. Aachi & Ssipak has the feel of chasing Pixie Sticks with Mountain Dew–it sure is extreme, and it leaves you feeling vaguely nauseous.

Dead Leaves and Tank Girl are the only comparable films that come to mind, but Aachi & Ssipak is a little deeper than either of those. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe Aachi & Ssipak is just a movie about pooping, and Korea is a country that sells a lot of laxatives.