Terror Taxi

Description

Taxis driven by ghosts and fueled by blood haunt the nightmarish streets of an unsuspecting city. Anybody can be the next passenger and the next victim? Under their hoods beat sinister heart-engines that thrive on blood and their running low! The drivers burn rubber and literally fly through the air looking for passengers too innocent, too jaded or too drunk to foresee the terror that awaits them.

Customer Reviews:

"You give dead taxi drivers a bad name.".......2005-08-23

Terror Taxi (2000)...sounds sort of redundant, especially if you've ever ridden in a cab within a major, metropolitan city or a foreign country as the drivers tend to follow an archaic set of traffic regulations only known to themselves, the main one being if you can do it without getting caught, it's legal. Directed by Seung-jun Heo, this South Korean production stars Seo-jin Lee (I Love You). Also appearing is Ho Lim (Bizarre Girl), Yu-jeong Choi (Flying Warriors), Hae-gyu Jeong, and Jae-yeong Jeong (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance).

As the story begins, we see an Asian man running down a darkened street, being chased by a taxi (I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't think of it right now). The man escapes down a narrow alley, one a car could never follow, that is unless it's a ghost car, which, I guess applies here as the taxi lifts itself up on two wheels and proceeds into the alley...and that is where the scene ends, and we get into the movie proper, meeting a young man named Gil-nam (Lee), a cabdriver by trade, and one whose life is filled with happy excitement fun because not only has he finally saved enough to get his own cab, but he is also planning to propose to his girlfriend Yu-jeong (Choi)...yes, let the super fantastic good times roll...but wait, on his way to pitch matrimonial woo, Gil-nam gets into a terrible sad accident, one that claims his life. Hello Kitty? No, no...Good-bye Kitty (okay, okay, that's more Japanese than Korean, so sue me...). Anyway, after his passing, Gil-nam learns the afterlife for cabbies (Korean ones, at least) isn't all its cracked up to be, as one does pretty much what they did before, without the benefits of being alive. Also, your taxi no longer has a mechanical engine, but a set of pulsating organs, and it doesn't run on gasoline, but rather blood, and human blood is the best, in terms of your miles per gallon ratio (I couldn't tell you the city/highway numbers as it was never given). Gil-nam begins to learn the ins and outs, with the help of two other deceased drivers named Okay (Jeong) and Non-Stop (Jeong), who, by the way, I believe to be a homersexual couple based on the way they constantly argued with each other, but that's never truly confirmed. But what is his purpose, Gil-nam wonders? Is this a sort of purgatory, an ethereal pit stop on the way to something else, something better? Perhaps, but first he must deal with the very real danger facing his still living girlfriend, danger in the form of a connection between Gil-nam's best friend Byoung-su (Lim) and a demonic, bloodthirsty ghost driver known as Mantis...what dark, mysterious secrets have brought them all together for one, final confrontation?

Now what I've written above seems pretty straight forward, right? I wish I could say the same for the film, as it took a good deal of effort to understand what was going on, and even now I'm sure I've probably missed a few things. Basically the film kind of comes off like that Patrick Swazye/Demi Moore film Ghost (1990), with taxicabs and no (thankfully) Whoopi Goldberg. I don't so much mind the confusion on my part, especially in terms of Asian films, as I chalk it up to cultural differences, and generally the movies I gravitate towards tend to provide striking and entertaining visuals along with eye-popping special effects. Honestly, I didn't know what the hell was going on in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), but I enjoyed it nonetheless as it was visually exciting. That's not the case here...I'm not saying all foreign films have to have crazy stunt work and mondo insano effects to be enjoyed, but if you're making a film about phantom taxis, one would kind of expect that to be a given...there are some effects, but they are way too far and few between. What there is does look pretty good in terms of a low budget feature. I was just expecting a whole lot more vehicular mayhem (Death Race 2000 style) given what was listed in the description, and I quote, `Taxis driven by ghosts and fueled by blood haunt the nightmarish streets of an unsuspecting city. Anybody can be the next passenger and the next victim? Under their hoods beat sinister heart-engines that thrive on blood and their running low! The drivers burn rubber and literally fly through the air looking for passengers too innocent, too jaded or too drunk to foresee the terror that awaits them.' Certainly sounds intriguing, doesn't it? Well, it's not...I've since looked up the film on The Internet Movie Database and found it is listed as a comedy, and that would go along with what I saw last night, although South Koreans definitely have a different idea of humor than we do here in the states. Most of the `comedic' sequences involved people verbally abusing each other, calling each other names like nimrod, a-hole, flea brain, and so on, along with steady streams of profanities and watching an extremely overweight man run around with no shirt on...the language certainly didn't bother me, but the lack of truly funny material did...oh yeah, let's no t forget the projectile vomiting...apparently that's also pretty funny to Asian viewers. Perhaps the one thing that bothered me more than anything else about this film (besides the price), was the fact the entire film was shown in a sickly, light green tint, kind of like what they did for The Matrix (1999), but it was much more obvious here and made me feel a sense of nausea after awhile. All in all, a quirky premise, one which I was perfectly willing to go along with, spoiled by a lack of special effects and also by the fact it wasn't bizarre enough to be entertaining.

Media Blaster/ Toyko Shock provide a decent fullscreen (1.33:1) picture on this DVD, but as I mentioned, the green tinge throughout was thoroughly annoying, but that's something inherent to the film, and not to the transfer. I suppose the Dolby Digital 2.0 audio was good, but I really didn't pay too much attention to it as it was in Korean, with English subtitles. There is no English dubbed track, but that's fine with me as I avoid those as they're generally of poor quality. There are a couple of features, the main being a featurette titled `The Making of Terror Taxi' (28:42), along with previews for some other films including Red Wolf (1995), Attack the Gas Station (1999), Alive (2002), and Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002).

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