It should come as no surprise to any of my readers that on my last visit to the video store, I picked up the two titles with the strangest cover art I could find. This is one of my favorite methods for movie selection, although sometimes I prefer to just close my eyes and grab something random from the cult section. But the cover art method is how I ended up watching A Tale of Two Sisters, a South Korean horror film, and Acne, a black and white film about teenagers who mutate because of the oil leakage in their drinking water. I could not have found a trippier couple of films.

Let's start with A Tale of Two Sisters, because this is the one I watched first. Directed by Kim Jee-woon, A Tale of Two Sisters is one of the most visually arresting films I've seen. Every shot is beautifully composed, but not a single one looks contrived. Watching it, you just believe you're peering into a universe of heightened aesthetics. It's got some of the vibrant colors of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but mostly the palette is much darker: rich browns, and the nebulous deep ochre of shadows. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.

Here's the story. Two sisters, Su-mi and Su-yeon (played by Im Soo-jung and Moon Geun-young, respectively) come with their widowed father to live with their wicked stepmother, who is an obsessive perfectionist with a frighteningly shrill voice. She fits the fairytale template so well that when things start going wrong, it doesn't occur to you to suspect anyone else. But pretty soon it becomes apparent that she can't be solely responsible for the malevolent vibe in the house. She begins seeing things, too, and she's every bit as terrified by these apparitions as the two girls. Things get weird and bloody in a hurry, and you're forced to question your own sense of what is really happening.

Now here's the funny part—I watched this movie without subtitles. Haha! Crazy huh? The thing is, our DVD player has been pretty moody lately, and we keep falling prey to its stubborn idiosyncrasies. On the night in question, the player was refusing to display subtitles. I went through the set-up menu at least 10 times, but no matter how many times I clicked on "give me English subtitles please," it did nothing. Nick gave it a shot, too, but even his technological Jedi mind tricks couldn't compel the player to do what were asking of it. In the end, I decided to just watch for a few minutes and then turn it off. It's a testament to the skill of the actors and the gothic, opium-dream look of the film that I continued to watch, even when I didn't know what the hell the characters were saying.

With most horror films—or, I should say, with most cheap-o American horror films—watching without understanding the dialog would not be a problem. They're so crammed full of visual cues that you'd have to be drunk, high, AND deceased not to understand what's going on. But A Tale of Two Sisters is one of those movies with a somewhat fractured narrative—with alternating versions of reality depending on whose perspective you are privy to—and I have a feeling that even with subtitles it would be tough to piece together. Oh, and did I mention that it's scary? Well, it is. There's a general creepiness imbuing the most mundane scenes, and during the scary scenes . . . well, let's just say it might be helpful to pick up a defibrillator on the way to the video store.

Next, we have the 2005 movie Acne, which was written, directed, and produced by indie film icon Rusty Nails. The film is like a 1950s B horror movie with a punk flair. It's funny, smart, and heavily symbolic, with a not-so-hidden message about the ruthlessness of certain commercial entitites. At the beginning, we are introduced to a teenaged brother and sister, Franny and Zooey (can you see where this is going already?), who become afflicted with a strange mutation in which the tops of their heads burst open like zits. The resulting condition looks sort of like a buzz cut, but instead of hair there is just an odd corona of upright skin. It's pretty vile, really, especially when they have to feed themselves, which they can only do by rubbing oily foods on the tops of their heads. Heh heh. Are you intrigued yet?

Anyway, this all turns out to be a conspiracy engineered by Mershey chocolate, oil companies, and the military, who deliberately introduced oil leakage into the water supply of a small town. The condition only affects teenagers because they have just the right amount of oil in their bodies, and so what we see is kids wandering the streets like zombies, lumbering into convenience stores and rubbing candy bars on their heads. They do have moments of clarity, but not many. Oh, and we learn that the military is standing by, waiting to wipe them out if they get out of hand. One scene shows an angry military commander grousing to himself about how nowadays you have to have a reason to kill and that he wishes he could bring the liberals "a G. Gordon Liddy sandwich." He then gets on the phone with the oil company rep, who tells him they need to re-introduce the contaminants into the town's water supply. When the commander hangs up, he mutters aloud: "man, those oil people have no souls." This bit of satire is so explicit it's pretty much inked across his forehead. But it's funny, so it works.

Throughout their trials and tribulations, Franny and Zooey engage in a number of comical, intellectual discussions about the world and their essential powerlessness in it. All of this culminates in what is possibly the greatest line spoken in recent cinematic history, "why couldn't we have been like Kerouac and Cassady, without the pusheads?" It's awesome.

FYI: The DVD also features several short films by Rusty Nails, including a hilarious one called "El Santiago." Get thee to a video store.