Crazy Boy

Crazy Boy was the first movie we watched that wasn’t set during the time of Japanese occupation of Korea.  Crazy Boy, whose real name is Hwang Suk-ah, is the manager of a band comprised of 5 Korean women.  In the beginning few scenes, the audience is introduced to Crazy Boy as a rather quiet, shy gentleman who is always looking out for his friends/band.  However, when Crazy Boy sees two men attempting to take advantage of a drunk, rich man and steal his wallet, the audience gets their first glimpse into the real Crazy Boy.  Crazy Boy doesn’t hesitate to whip out his fighting skills and kick these boys’ butts and return the wallet and watch to their rightful owner. 

Although Crazy Boy wasn’t released during any one of Korea’s three golden ages of Korean cinema according to Kim Soyoung, it was released during the latter half of the 1980s, when Hong Kong action resurfaced in the Korean market (Soyoung 97).  However, as Professor Cho told us, it was released in 1985, right after the censorship laws in South Korea were relaxed.  This Hwalkuk, or action movie, was not only chalk full of Crazy Boy’s fight scenes but also with some pretty overt scenes of women’s bodies, sex, drugs, and even rape.  This might have been due to the fact that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, South Korea saw the scale of consumer intensiveness expand (Nelson 107).  The concept of frugality and thriftiness has been long embedded in Korean culture, in part due to the Neo-Confucian principles prominent during the Choson period. Even throughout the period of Japanese colonial domination, “Christian organizations passed along a message of egalitarianism and thrift together with their support of national development and independence in their many schools and organizations” (Nelson 109). However, according to Nelson, consumer opportunities blossomed in the 1980s (114).  Crazy Boy is an example of the combination of sex, scandal, and action which South Koreans were beginning to welcome.  A quote in Nelson’s chapter from the Seoul YMCA in 1986 claims that “society’s consume trend is developing toward extravagance and an all-out dedication to pleasure because the general recognition of the value of abstinence has been erased” (116).