The streaming era has democratized film distribution in many ways, offering direct user-uploaded platforms like YouTube & Vimeo to publish your work for a worldwide audience alongside lower-tier streamers who are hungry to fill their libraries with cheap-to-license titles like Tubi, Hoopla, and PlutoTV.  Good luck getting anyone to actually watch your work, though.  Because there are so many platforms for low-budget productions, the likelihood that an audience will stumble across your particular no-budget movie in the endless #content wilderness shrinks every year.  There are some ways that the scarcity of earlier eras was healthy for the independent filmmaking landscape, if not only because it was a lot more likely that your film would get noticed outside your local friend-circle bubble.  For instance, a digi-SOV sci-fi novelty from Korea could break out of the genre film fest circuit to reach an international audience and land a belated review from luminary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum despite being shot on home video equipment in empty alleys & warehouses.  The try-hard edginess of Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine tested my patience as soon as I read its title, but there was something about its “Let’s put on a show!” no-budget earnestness that made me weirdly nostalgic for a recent bygone era.  Nowadays, you have to be Steven Soderbergh if you want your handheld digi-cam experiments to earn a sizable audience for anything longer than a TikTok clip.  So, even when I was wincing at the grotesque ribaldry that Teenage Hooker wanted me to find humorous, I still found myself compelled to pour one out for the D.I.Y. cyberpunk gore hounds who’ve been left behind by the cruel march of time. 

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine is SOV genre trash about an underage sex worker who’s murdered by her schoolteacher then brought back to life by a mad scientist as a killer cyborg on a revenge mission.  Because the movie is only an hour long (and bookended by at least ten minutes of opening & closing credits), there isn’t much else to divulge beyond that one-sentence premise.  All I can really do here is spoil its one great idea: the strap-on machine gun our undead heroine uses to shoot her teacher dead from crotch level in the final scene.  Everything before that final act of criminally horny violence is either a goofball non sequitur (like an impromptu dance break when the evil teacher first discovers his student turning tricks in an alley, disturbing his mother’s sleep) or a home movie level restaging of more substantial, professional work (including a cosplay version of the cyborg-construction imagery of Ghost in the Shell).  Had the entire movie been a revenge rampage in which the main weapon of choice was a cyborg’s killer strap-on, this would still very likely be making the rounds as a must-see cult film for dorm room stoners everywhere.  Instead, it’s just outrageous enough of a stunt that you can see how it briefly held audiences’ attention in the early 2000s.  There’s little scene-to-scene cohesion in its hurried shaky-cam tours through the back alleys of Seoul, but every few scenes there’s a detail that’ll perk you up in your seat: nighttime sunglasses paired a schoolgirl uniform, sex set to Benny Hill-style novelty jazz, a bed that is also a lightbulb, etc.  It’s the kind of movie where the protagonist is shot in the chest, exposing the wires inside, just so you can turn to your nearest bro and shout “Whoa, her tit exploded!” between bong rips.

I mostly had a good time with Teenage Hooker despite my dorm room days being decades behind me.  Its humor is flat, its sex is sour, and its comic book stylization can be a little embarrassing for an adult audience … and yet, there’s something mesmerizing about its digi-cam cinematography that makes it a thrilling watch.  The absurdly wide fish-eye lenses and the handheld jerkiness of its framing—combined with the late-90s record store staff-picks soundtrack—gives it the instant cool cred of a vintage skateboarding video, a relic of a time long gone.  I dare say there’s even a Wong Kar Wai quality to the digital red, yellow, and green hazes of its fluorescent-lit color palette.  There are dozens of Japanese genre titles from this era that I would recommend someone check out before prioritizing Teenage Hooker (the playful handheld camera work of Hideaki Anno’s Cutie Honey and the vicious, supernatural schoolgirl violence of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club both immediately come to mind), but the D.I.Y. production values and the Korean context of this specific title do make it tempting to root for as an underdog.  Even now, while we’re living under the illusion that every movie ever made is affordable & accessible, I had to access Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine through Archive.org, since it wasn’t commercially available through any official means.  At least that low-quality, heavily pixelated transfer accentuated the early-2000s nostalgia of the presentation, recalling a time when it would take 20 hours to download no-budget schlock like this through a torrent tracker – a time when no-budget schlock like this was enough of a buzzy online attention-grabber to be worth that all-day wait.

-Brandon Ledet