Doomsday Book (2012)
Having reviewed a VHS film and the ABCs of Death already this month, often commenting how the many weak points tend to weigh down the strong, I'm starting to ponder whether it is preferable to rate these films as a singular whole, just because they are packaged that way. After all, if you rented a short film collection (or watched a short film package at a festival) that bundled various shorts together as short films, you would take them as individual parts. It seems that all of these collections choose to bundle as much because that is the only marketable strategy for short films as any deep artistic demand. So perhaps we should see through the bundle and be willing to celebrate the individuals without regard to what is around it.
Doomsday Book ties three otherwise unconnected stories together with the theme of apocalypse. Vaguely speaking, these are the three well worn threats of zombies, robots and meteors, each with their own twist. The first film, using zombie apocalypse to comment on industrial food production, feels almost wholly uninspired, though in no way offensive either. The third act moves toward more interesting potential in the face of a meteor strike, but doesn't really deliver much. It is the middle film, from Kim Jee-Woon, that should be watched, even if in the midst of the others (though the film is on Netflix Instant and nothing is stopping you from forwarding to the middle film and stopping when it ends).
Heavenly Creature has a robot technician going to a Buddhist monastery to check on a robot that may be malfunctioning, in that it seems to claim, or be claimed by the monks around, to be the Buddha. This setting is quite rich for a fairly deep exploration of religion/philosophy and while much of it is pretty specific to Buddhism, one could reasonably draw this robot as a Christ figure. Would we accept Buddha/Christ or would we think him malfunctioning? Would we demand diagnostic proof or would we take it on faith? Where it gets more inherently Buddhist is when it draws more fully on the nature of a robot and how that can make it seem almost like a divine, superior being when considering what one strives toward in Buddhism to reach enlightenment/Nirvana. The film does feel weaker in its latter part which gets a bit too expository rather than meditative, but it is definitely worth seeing.
The entirety of the set rates very low on the scare scale, with only the first film registering any level of gore so it should be pretty accessible.
Heavenly Creature 4/5
As a whole 3/5