The Movie: Attack The Gas Station! was a hugely popular flick in its native Korea, but it's just now finding its way into American DVD players. It's a dark comedy, along the lines of Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, centered around a group of four guys who, unsatisfied with the small amount of money they got by robbing a gas station, take its owner and workers hostage, and decide to run the station themselves.

It takes a while to get going, but there are definitely some hilarious parts. Most of the humor is of the slapstick variety, or otherwise some kind of humor found in violence. You'll also find a few hints of social commentary, or perhaps more accurately, social criticism, directed at the Korean economy, the police force, and perhaps even the way Koreans raise their children.

The movie gets better as you get to know the characters, but because of how slow it was before that point, I have to rate this film as just average. Besides, the overall level of Korean cinema is still pretty low when compared to some other markets, and it shows itself in poor pacing and awkward framing, among other ways. But, it was still an entertaining movie that you might want to check out if you're looking for something different.

The DVD: This has got to be the worst DVD production I have ever seen. Although this is a Korean film, released on DVD for the American market, the only choices for audio are Mandarin and Cantonese dubbed audio tracks. No Korean, no English. Just two varieties of Chinese audio. I suppose it really doesn't matter to you if you don't know Korean or don't even know how it sounds, but it seems pretty silly to me to only include audio tracks that are dubbed in languages that are not the original language, nor the language of the country the title is being sold in.

The audio gets a ZERO rating, and that's before we even get to talking about just how terrible the sound quality is! I might as well have been listening to this movie on one of those drive-in theater speakers that hang on your window, that's how terrible it is.

The video was equally terrible. Poor contrast, crushed blacks, poor resolution... there are no redeeming qualities about the video on this DVD whatsoever, except perhaps the fact that it gave me a vague idea of what was going on in the movie. And even then, there were some points were the crushed blacks were so bad, I couldn't actually tell what was going on at all in the dark scenes.

Those viewing this DVD on a widescreen TV will only be further irritated by the fact that the video is non-anamorphic, but on top of that, the subtitles (which will be required for anyone who can't understand Chinese) are mostly displayed in the black bars of the letterboxing... so you can't even use the "zoom" function to make the image fill the screen... meaning that folks with widescreen TVs have to watch this movies with black bars ON ALL FOUR SIDES OF THE IMAGE.

Yep, the video gets a big fat ZERO too. And special features? Well, if you can consider trailers for other movies a special feature, then I guess you'll be satisfied with the extras on this disc. If not, then well, sorry, there's nothing else.