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The Piano Man (Choi Min-su) is a particularly ruthless serialkiller,
who often tortures his victims in a particularly ruthless way, like
ripping their eyes out when they are still alive and sewing their mouth
shut with piano wire. But he sees the whole thing only as a game, and he
often announces his next kills to detective Song Mi-ran (Lee Seung-yeon),
the only person he thinks worthy to even compete with him - even though he
is always confident he is a step or two ahead of her ... and repeatedly he
succeeds in making a fool of the police, for example when he kills a key
witness right in front of their very eyes when he sets himself on fire
wearing a protective suit and ultimately uses himself as a human fireball,
burning the man to a cinder.
Besides Song Mi-ran, Jinwoo (Hong Kyoung-in), the son of down-and-out
alcoholic cop Yang (Park Cheol), also tries to get a lead on the Piano
Man, using a combination of information from the internet (not as common
in 1996 as it is nowadays), from true crime magazines and from crime
fiction, much to the dismay of his father who wants his son to do anything
but follow his footsteps ... and Jiwoon is actually getting close enough
to the Piano Man to almost get killed.
The finale: The Piano Man has captured another girl, jazz singer Kay,
who actually once was his girlfriend, and openly threatens to kill her,
but leaves a trail for Song Mi-ran that is easy for her to pick up ... but
that's of course a trap, and soon it turns out that the next victim of the
Piano Man might actually be her - but with their combined forces, Kay and
Song Mi-ran ultimately manage to defeat the Piano Man ...
There are some nice ideas in this film ... but ultimately the whole
thing is way too convoluted to actually work, it simply suffers from an
overload of subplots and isolated setpieces that all distract from the
story rather than contribute to it while some key elements of the story
seem to be actually left out or (as with the almost death of Jiwoon) told
in such an unnecessarily confusing way one has no idea what has happened.
As for the gore scenes: The film seems to be awfully indecisive about what
to show and what not, so while the camera shows some gruesome details
full-on while it timidly fades away from others - with no apparent
patterns. And the characters ? Detective Song Mi-ran stays pale
throughout, alcoholic detective Yang seems interesting at first but is
then left out of most of the story, Jiwoon is the typical obnoxious kid
investigator that seems to be a bit out of place in a gruesome film like
this ... and the Piano Man himself is nothing but a walking clichém, with
no real persona of his own.
As a whole, the film is a waste of time rather than anything else.
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find Piano Man at adultvideouniverse.com
