INDEPENDENCE DAZE

REVIEWED - SAVE THE GREEN PLANET (JIGUREUL JIKYEORA!): You certainly get your money's worth with Korean cinema. Save the Green Planet is a sci-fi eco-comedy with marked absurdist tendencies, which, after dallying awhile in social commentary, touches on a poignantly played personal drama before, for one last time, turning into something else entirely.

Not all of it works, but the picture is put together with such passion and is so energetically imagined that it proves hard to resist.

An eccentric young man has come to the conclusion that a race of aliens is planning to destroy the earth during an imminent eclipse. Suspecting that the creatures' representative on earth is the CEO of a powerful chemical company, he kidnaps the businessman, ties him to a chair and, for reasons too bizarre too relate, begins torturing him with bee-sting salve.

Did the invaders from beyond the stars damage the health of the hero's mother when carrying out experiments to ascertain why humans behave as they do? Maybe they did. Maybe he's not so crazy after all.

As the film progresses it moves, or rather jolts, from wacky comedy into something more serious. Indeed, the penultimate episode - which comes right before things go totally bananas for good - treats the hero's relationship with his mother very tenderly.

While director Jang Jun-Hwan's greater purpose never becomes entirely clear, notions about the destructiveness hard-wired into humankind and the corruption that comes with corporate power do gradually form themselves, and the picture does eventually make some sort of philosophical sense. The consistently unhinged tone may, however, frustrate less patient viewers.