I recently watched the Korean theatrical version and it reminded me of Silence of the Lambs and Seven. This is ferociously brutal, yet the script is as mature as the violence. It's a revenge movie that I would rank as superior to Oldboy. Oldboy was just too damned weird for me, but I found the story in this movie very impressive. This is a vast improvement over his last movie "The Good, The Bad, The Weird", which I thought was horrible. (But all of Ji-Woon Kim's earlier efforts - The Quiet Family, The Foul King, Tale of Two Sisters, Bittersweet Life - all excellent.)

Here's the imdb page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588170/

And the Han Cinema page: http://www.hancinema.net/korean_movie_I … _Devil.php

I Saw The Devil originally received the equivalent of an X rating (http://asianmediawiki.com/I_Saw_the_Devil), making this the most violent Korean movie I'm aware of. The only comparable film in American cinema I'm aware of is Robocop, which also received an X rating.

My brother took me to see RoboCop back when it came out.  I was only seven, and it managed to rip out a huge chunk of my innocence.

Response #1: Ehh, it's alright, you didn't need it anyway!

Response #2: Ehh, you know what they say, right? Easy come, easy go!

Response #3: You're talking about that kind of innocence? D: Good Lord, you poor girl...and at that age?!

Your brother must be some kind of ninja wizard to sneak a tiny little girl into such a stark, bleak, violent film.

Provided you've had your shots, I'd buy that for a dollar!

As an example of the era, my parents took me to see Die Hard with no problems. The ratings of movies were not consciously part of my family's movie going choices. My Mom probably liked Bruce Willis, so that's why we went. I don't remember the reason, but shortly after the release of the movie, a company put some battery operated water guns on the market that looked just like the machine gun Willis used. That was ironic, since the cop Willis was talking to had shot a kid because his toy gun looked real. There were no bright colors on the guns; they looked like real machine guns. My grandma bought one for me and another for my brother.

  I don't recall any sort of enforcement of the ratings when I was a child/teenager. At age 14, I paid for and watched Total Recall (R-rated) in the theater without question.

  My theory is that movies had not yet started to take the bulk of the blame for certain errant behaviors of people. These days, a movie can be a "bad" thing, as if it's capable of doing something other than nothing. Maybe one day we'll realize that humans should take responsibility for their behaviors. Anyone that is influenced by a movie to commit a crime is "stupid". People are guilty, not movies.