Similar to the movies of Park Chan-Wook, this Korean horror/serial-killer movie is a really well done and well-acted film about what happens when revenge becomes all-consuming and turns a victim of a crime into what may be the equal force of evil in combating it. It features Choi Min-Sik(who was also the titular star of Chan-Wook's OLDBOY) as our psychopathic/rapist/all-around deviant fellow and he's perfectly creepy in that role. While I wouldn't say this is as good as Chan-Wook's films I think it works great as a revenge story that mixes horror elements along with more standard Hong Kong-style action bits and is worth a watch. I also felt that this plays like a great bloody Asian version of The Punisher story but with more knives and kung fu and less guns.
The Korean censors made director Kim Jee-Won cut about 10 minutes of gore footage from this to get a release and this theatrical version is the one I've seen. A longer cut played at festivals and is supposed to be super graphic but that would bring the total run-time up to over 2 and a half hours which seems a little excessive for a story that I think could have played out in a shorter form pretty easily.
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