COURTESY OF LVHIFF

True tale has
compelling twists

What a testosterone fest! A bunch of scummy prisoners and low-lifes being beaten and harangued and exercised into an elite group of soldiers for a top-secret suicide mission. Everyone screams and shrieks and curses and the sweat flies and they're bare-chested most of the time and when the only woman in the movie appears, she has no lines and is brutally raped. This is not treated as a good thing. It's an excuse for more bloodletting and corporal punishment.

"Silmido" South Korea, part of the festival's Eastern Showcase Playing at 7:45 p.m. today and 4:30 p.m. Monday at Dole Cannery cineplex Rating: Details: HIFF runs through Oct. 31. Tickets are $8. Check the Web site hiff.org for a schedule, or call 528-4433.

And then they set off on their mission -- to decapitate "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung! But, halfway there, the soldiers are recalled, and this big-budget Korean film stops being an Asian "Dirty Dozen" and becomes something altogether different and more thoughtful.

Silmido is the name of the small island where the convict-soldiers were trained. It turns out to be a true story, recently revealed, and the word "Silmido" has entered the Korean pop culture now with a larger meaning, like "Watergate" has in America -- government perfidy, lies, cover-ups, crimes in the name of patriotism, sacrifice, a sense of shifting moral values and ethics gone awry.

The time is the late '60s and tensions on the Korean peninsula are very high. A failed North Korean attempt to assassinate President Park Chung-hee inspires the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and the ROK air force to train their own batch of commandos. When the political climate changes, what do officials do with this charged-up and bloodthirsty band of patriotic zealots? It would be a plot spoiler to reveal what. But it really happened, and was appalling even by the harsh standards of the Cold War.

These guys aren't exactly model citizens who can muster out and open a kim chee stand somewhere. They are highly trained, do-or-die scumbags with a blinding sense of mission and bonding. They're dangerous, even to their handlers. In this way, the film makes a wry comment on the standards created by the militaristic society created by the bisecting of Korea. Indeed, the sub-theme is one of loyalty and honor perverted. It is deeply paranoid and haunting.

Director Woo-Suk Kang shows a sure hand in directing both action sequences and spookily intimate encounters, and also has a sense of choreography. The effects and technical prowess are first-rate -- there are plenty of Hollywood products that don't look this good or move this well.

When it opened in Korea about this time last year, "Silmido" quickly became the largest-grossing Korean movie to date. Millions attended and it became the talk of the peninsula. More than that, the country's Defense Ministry was forced to confirm the existence of the Silmido tragedy, leading to an investigation of the KCIA.