Ki-tae and Cheol-su are a couple of young street toughs looking to get married to the mob. Cheol-su fancies himself an enforcer for the local “working girls,” while Ki-tae protects neighborhood kids from other would-be hoodlums. Through their connections, they end up taking part in a big-time drug deal. When the exchange turns deadly, the boys break ranks and flee. The crime boss is none too pleased with their panicking, and demands that they either repay the lost $10,000, or avenge those who died.

Naturally, the guys try to raise the cash while keeping one step ahead of the law. When Ki-tae stumbles across a big bag of cocaine, they see a possible way out of their predicament. With the help of a hooker friend, they head off to Japan to make a deal worth $500,000. This way, they can repay the boss and start life over again. But there is someone from their past, someone very angry, who wants his own satisfaction, and he won’t take an apology, or cash, to quell it.

Loud, illogical, and without a single redeeming character, Jungle Juice is the Korean cinema’s idea of an American mob comedy. You know the kind - idiots want to join the syndicate, screw up a big job, end up owing the bosses big time, and botch their way through trying to replace the cash/stash. Profanity is tossed about freely, and violence forms both the slapstick and the sinister quality of the narrative. In the end, we are rooting for our amateur anti-heroes, since no one wants the gangsters to win and, with the help of a surprising ally, our leads learn a lesson and get some manner of backwards reward in the process.

It should work effortlessly. We should grow in our acceptance of these misfits, learn why the wrong side of the law holds such an allure, and realize that the adventures we’ve witnessed were all part of some strange coming-of-age ritual that results in change and catharsis. Without these elements, we have nothing but a “crime is glamorous” crapshoot that kills its purpose with firepower and foolishness.

But director Min-Ho Cho doesn’t understand the basics of balance. He allows Jungle Juice to careen all over the screen, moving from dark drama to way-out wackiness in a manner that is both awkward and obvious. In his lead roles, he employs two over-the-top baboons (actually, actors Hyuk Jang and Beom-su Lee) and forces them to mug, mince, and basically mess about without a single scintilla of purpose. No attempt at dimension or depth is made, and their cartoonish capering is about as endearing as an ear infection. In essence, they are not really part of the story.

They are like the necessary linking verb in a sentence, a way of connecting the drug-dealing story with the gang violence goofiness. Min-ho doesn’t even set up the story properly. Instead, we are introduced to necessary elements in offhand, haphazard fashion. The backstory involving sports and college? It’s part of a post-coital tryst with a hooker. The entire power struggle playing out in the mob? Left to a couple of casual comments between the hoods. One character’s missing testicle? A one-off joke that goes nowhere. Instead of setting up clear distinctions, believable aims, and straightforward action, everything here swirls around like a bunch of rats caught in a sewer riptide…and all we are left with is the smell.

Not only is Jungle Juice an outrage, but it can also be categorized as something much worse - the promising film that pisses all of its potential away. There really is no hope for these brain-dead dolts, but the whore with a heart of ice and a decided derring-do (she is nicknamed Meg Ryan and is played with pluck by Hye-jin Jeon) would make a natural center for the story. Our unpleasant putzes could be tossed aside, and Min-ho could have made this Meg’s story of survival and double-crossing. She has the most interesting history, her resolve is fierce and independent, and she manages to thwart those situations that her idiotic partners fall into like fruit carts during a chase scene.

But Min-ho keeps her minor, never letting anything she does or determines overwhelm her miserable macho sidekicks. Perhaps it’s a sly commentary on Asian social structure, or a way of representing girl power without shooting off sparks, but it’s boring. Indeed, almost all of Jungle Juice is inert and uninteresting. Even the title tonic - a homemade brew that leads to some heady hallucinations - makes a single, sad appearance here before disappearing into the ephemera.

At the one-hour mark, we are wishing for something to happen, and at the one-hour-and-30-minute mark, we just want it to end. Jungle Juice could very easily be called Bungled Sap or Botched Brew as it lumbers along on screams, curse words, and…not much else. This is moviemaking as an amplified experience, with everything turned up to Spinal Tap‘s “11,” without any of that film’s wit, wisdom, satire, or irony. While it’s a professional and high-profile movie to look at (this is no low-budget romp), we are still treated to a scattershot story that never settles in to allow us entry.

It may have sides splitting in Seoul and be breaking box-office records in Bangkok, but for some reason, Jungle Juice just doesn’t translate to a Western ideal - and the funny thing is, it more or less steals, openly and honestly, from the British and American indie scene from the last two decades. Two better and more accurate titles would have been Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Dimwits or Dolt Fiction, since this is one homage that is hasty and malformed. Unless you’re some manner of Asian film completist, there is no reason to sample this stale, stinking fluid.

Poor Patrick Smash was born with a problem: a gas problem. You see, he has two stomachs, and his overactive digestion produces an excess amount of colon blow. From the time he was an infant to his current pre-teen years, Patrick has been one incredibly farty fiend. He farts day and night. He farts in school. He farts in private. And it’s caused him nothing but trouble. His father leaves the family because of it. The bullies pick on him over his continuous crack coughs. Even the teachers dismiss the needy child on account of his active ass. But when our sad little lad meets up with science geek Alan A. Allen, the two become best friends for life.

Unfortunately, their camaraderie is challenged when the U.S. government whisks Alan off to help with a space station malfunction. Hoping to locate his pal, Patrick joins up with an opera singer who wants to use the boy’s butthole as a means of obtaining vocal heights (don’t ask). When that ends badly, our poot prodigy winds up in the hands of Uncle Sam as well. Turns out, his tushy produces the perfect rocket fuel to send Alan’s specially designed rocket into the stratosphere. Even better, Patrick will be able to live out his lifelong dream - he has always wanted to be an astronaut. Too bad his Thunderpants kept getting in the way. Now, for once, they won’t.

Thunderpants is a one-joke movie that decides to abandon said gag about 20 minutes in for some routine Roald Dahl-like misadventures. When focused on the farting - yes, this film is really just an extended barking spider spoof with half-baked kid-lit fantasies thrown in for unequal measure—the movie mostly works. But once it decides to warm to the whimsy, everything falls apart. Granted, the humor is coarse, and forced through a decidedly British concept of comedy, meaning there’s lots of personal embarrassment and exaggerated freakishness to be found. This is the kind of film that wants audiences to laugh at oversized bullies cold-cocking the decidedly dorky heroes, to celebrate the inhuman stench coming out of a little boy’s bottom, and cheer as he uses his multifaceted flatulence to show up his enemies and win the day.

Such a concept is not without its charms. When handled correctly, the air biscuit can be a beautiful thing. Its combination of sound and sour substance has been known to leave many a listener doubled over in uncontrollable snickering. It’s the pre-schoolers’ first foray into funny business, an art form to adolescents, an adult’s primary form of non-erotic bonding, and the elderly’s personal entertainment element for the grandkids. But here, writer/director Peter Hewitt (working with co-writer Phil Hughes) decides to do away with the butt trumpet early on, focusing instead on a bizarre opera singer subplot, and then the movie’s main mission, using poor Patrick Smash’s overactive alimentary canal as a means of saving some space shuttle astronauts. With Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint along as uber-nerd Alan A. Allen, we’re stuck with not one but three storylines that basically don’t work.

Let’s take them one at a time, shall we. First, there is Patrick Smash’s personal predicament. Granted, it’s pretty hysterical when an infant version of our hero basically blasts away for 10 minutes straight. From the moment he’s born to the second his father leaves, tired of putting up with the nonstop sphincter popping, Hewitt has us in toilet-humor titters. But like many English fantasies, things turn dark rather quickly. Mom starts pounding the sauce, and the school tormenters go to outrageous extremes to undermine Patrick. After a while - the aforementioned 20 minutes - Thunderpants is no longer funny. It’s sad, dour, and kind of cruel.

Even when Patrick discovers Alan (a boy who can tolerate his toots because of a defective nose), their friendship is fragile and very desperate. It makes us wonder what will happen next - and then the singer storyline kicks in. Embodied by U.K. luminary Simon Callow, this oversized vocal egotist employs Patrick to hit the high notes in an impossible aria, the goal being international acclaim and the title of world’s number-one tenor. Naturally, it makes no sense, as does our lead’s ability to fart like a singing voice (where’s La Petomane when you need him?). But things really go out of whack when Patrick is charged with murder - huh? - and ends up on trial. The courtroom material is not clever, and wastes the sizable talents of Brit wit Stephen Fry. Before we know it, however, the U.S. government is stepping in, and Patrick is off to lend his anal gas to the Red, White, and Blue.

It’s the transition over to action man mode than really fails Thunderpants. We discover that Alan has been working on an engine which mimics Patrick’s two-stomach situation, but thanks to some bumbling adults (the research staff of this NASA-like agency is all brainiac kids), the system has failed. So Mr. Russet Gusset must sit in a toilet-like booster seat on the space shuttle and literally “blast” the rocket into orbit. This is all taken with tongue-in-cheek seriousness, mind you. Ned Beatty plays the God-fearing director of the agency, his occasionally inappropriate remarks (“this boy’s a fruit,” “this boy’s a tool”) explained away as misconstrued religious musings. He’s matched in shame by Paul Giamatti, skinnier than we’ve seen him in a while (the film is five years old, after all) and doing the straight-laced secret agent bit to the 40th degree.

Of course, everything is warm and fuzzy - and apparently quite odiferous - in the end, with our hated human oddities the celebrated saviors of the day, and everyone who ever wronged them gathered up for a pre-credit grab at a piece of the pair’s fame. The unsuccessful melding of the sentimental with the slapstick, the sincere with the scatological makes Thunderpants nearly impossible to enjoy. In fact, it’s so mannered in its presentation (Patrick overuses certain supposedly clever catchphrases over and over and over again) that it’s hard to imagine kids being the least bit interested - at least, after the ass-gas blasting takes a bum burp backseat.

Once upon a time, in a freaked-out future that’s already a decade past, the entire planet is in the grip of BIM. You can’t go anywhere without experiencing the magic that is…well, that is BIM. BIM is a pop song. BIM is a mass-marketed body sticker. BIM is a tall triangular glass and the ruby red joy juice drunk from it. BIM is…you have no idea what BIM is, do you? Guess what, neither does anyone else in the pre-Apocalyptic world of…well, the world.

Yes, the planet is run by the music industry (at least one accurate prediction that even Nostradamus, Alvin Toffler, and Jeane Dixon all missed), and Mr. Boogalow is the business’s chief chart-topper. He pairs up innocuous tone-deaf teens with names like Pandi, Dandi, Bibi, and Alphie, and turns their trite tunes into a regular opiate for the masses. But there is more to the demented Don Kirshner than meets the eye. You see, Mr. Boogalow is…wait for it…the DEVIL! And he is trying to hypnotize the entire world toward the ways of wantonness via that objet d’evil - the hit record.

So when a couple of rubes from the backwater burg of Moose Jaw enter the World Vision Song Contest with the hope that their self-penned anthem “Love: The Universal Melody” will whip up on the overwhelmingly more popular “BIM is the Power,” Boogalow uses the infamous red tape (no, not bureaucracy—an actual crimson cassette) to rig the results (apparently, Jem and the Holograms took third). He then applies the marketing-appropriate mantra, “If you can’t beat ‘em, own ‘em,” and tries to get the couple to sign away their souls…sorry, publishing rights. Soon, Bibi is indentured to this hyper-mega-super-duper conglomerate Boogalow International Music (B…I…M…oh, yeah…like BMI. Now it makes…no, it doesn’t) and it’s up to Alphie to save her from an incendiary afterlife. But it will be hard. After all, she’s had a bite of The Apple literally.

Did you ever wonder what the world would be like if God were a white-leisure-suit-wearing tycoon type who drove his solid gold Rolls down from Heaven to transport a commune of hippies over to a brand new planet? Or if Satan were a fey music mogul who resembled Udo Kier’s interpretation of the role of Carmen Ghia from The Producers? Perchance, what if Adam and Eve - or at least a “babes in the woods” folk-rock and roll interpretation of same - were an Australian idiot boy and the star of Night of the Comet? And let’s just say for the sake of silly argument that the Devil employs a few mediocre minions who are incredibly sad excuses for Roger Daltrey, Nina Simone, and Meshach Taylor. Layer on the worst musical score since Sly Stallone’s brother proved why “Staying Alive” is not necessarily a good thing, and you’ve got The Apple, a gamy glitterdome of outrageous kitsch passing itself off as a futuristic fable.

Resembling a stage show version of the Rapture as interpreted by Disco Tex and his Sex-o-lettes (“Get Dancin’,” y’all!), this aimless allegory about the battle between good (or at least kind of decent) and evil (or as construed by this film, the flamboyantly fashionable) has all the subtlety of a steam-powered enema and reeks just as pungently. If you ever wanted proof of the madness that meanders through the mind of Menahem Golan (famous Cannon Films producer of such classical gas as The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington and Breakin’), look no further than this tale of Mr. Boogalow and his plans for a dictatorial fascist state based in and around the culture of the pop song (and this predates boy bands by a good decade).

The fact that this concept did not work out too well for either Brian DePalma (his Phantom of the Paradise is a noble failure) or 1977’s abortive TV series A Year at the Top (costars Greg “BJ and the Bear” Evigan and Paul “David Letterman” Shaffer never got past the first couple of months of the titular time frame) didn’t stop Golan from pursuing his crappy cinematic concept album. Indeed, it appears that the entire entertainment world in the mid to late 1970s was fixated on two divergent, yet still forced to cohabitate together, themes - mainly, that the future would be a dire, dreary place dominated by Bob Mackie’s designs, and that rock and roll would have to step up to save all of our mortal souls.

From the Bee Gees / Peter Frampton flop based on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the just plain awful Americathon, everyone was predicting that the 1990s would be the time when the population finally paid the piper for lousing things up. Oh, and for making such beat-heavy horsecrap as “Push in the Bush” and “Boogie Oogie Oogie” Grammy Award-winning and popular. And, aside from grunge and the introduction of the mp3, they may have had a point.

The Apple indeed polishes its loopy fruit via this future shock silliness. According to this sci-fi fart, 1994 was to be the temporal space when everyone wore multicolored prism stickers on their faces and caked on more makeup than Boy George after a night at TABOO, and when police give citations for failing to “BIM” (whatever the Hades that anagram really stands for—“Beelzebub’s Irritating Musical,” perhaps?). It will take a group of radicals to stand up to the persecution and provocation of this wah-wah pedal man-goat-backed police state, so you’ll never guess who The Apple pegs for its protectors. Why, the great unwashed, otherwise known as hippies.

That’s right, gang…hippies. Peace, love, and flower power. In the realm of The Apple, when faced with the prospect of Hell on Earth, mankind will turn to a Jerry Garcia clone and his “still somehow relevant” roundup of peaceniks to save the world from eternal damnation at the hands of ersatz Duran Duran (the Barbarella version). Who cares if they live in a cave, avoid soap and water, and warble Moby Grape songs to each other - these are the saviors of the universe!

Worse yet, when all appears lost, Mr. Topps - AKA old Yahweh himself - cruises down the horizon in his sacred stretch limo and decides to send Jerry and his kids to another planet, to start over again without the influence of Boogalow and what he represents (i.e., rock and roll). So the ultimate message of The Apple is that (a) music is bad, (b) the Devil is bad, (c) letting your freak flag fly wins you a ticket to a new cosmic homeland, and (d) producers of B-movie mung should never be allowed to interpret the Good Book via power ballad.

And that’s the main issue here. More important than all the Biblical bull broth is the fact that The Apple is, for want of a better term, a musical. Really, it’s more of a Gilbert and Sullivan light operetta than a rock and roll opus - if, of course, the particular creators you’re thinking of are Gottfried and Annie. Such a spectacular sonic scourge that your tightly honed sensibilities may never recover, the score here is the antithesis of melody and harmony. You name a genre or style - reggae, ‘50s ballad, disco dirge, Broadway-style show tune - and The Apple rapes it like the Sabine women or the swan-serving Leda. With lyrics composed by a random phrase generator, and an old-fashioned Eastern Bloc Iron Curtain interpretation of contemporary accompaniment, the tunes here put us through the aural equivalent of a painful rectal itch.

Lines fail to rhyme, emotions are so spelled out that inbred invertebrates can figure out the meaning, and everything feels like it was produced by Georgio Moroder’s insane brother, Earl. Like a baby watching magic (an actual line from one of the hackneyed horrors here), The Apple‘s musical cues confuse and frighten us - not because of how bad they are, but for how painfully close they come to the Billboard ballyhoo actually arcing across radio dials all over America circa 2008 (add a guest rap or two by 50 Cent or Ludacris, and it would be impossible to tell the difference).

Sadly, The Apple is not a cult classic - unless, of course, you’re referring to the kind of fodder that would actually cause the Branch Davidians to answer their “calling.” It’s not bad/good like Can’t Stop the Music or awful/artful like KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. No, this surreal seminar on the abuse of filmmaking power is in a deranged category all its own. It tends to dwell in the “What the Hell?” or “How Can This Be?” realm of the ridiculous. The film is so unfathomable that you can’t imagine anyone walking away after reading this script and thinking, “Now there’s something sensible.” With an overall design scheme that recalls Blitz kids with leprosy, and a narrative that never really understands the requirements of a parable, The Apple plays more like the fever dream of a deposed priest, an awkward overreaction to the popularity of religiously-based rock musicals (as if we didn’t already have reason to hate Godspell).

Perhaps the best way to watch this film is to turn on the English subtitles and read along with the kindergarten song craft as game performers belt out completely incompetent brain busters. It may be worth a look, and there could be a few who actually tune in, turn on, and drop out - of the gene pool, that is - based on the befuddling film before them. The Apple should be a celebration of all that is camp. Instead, it’s just seriously disturbed.