he film opens with the Republic of Singapore apparently being under an immense invasion from a fictional army, with iconic Singaporean landmarks (such as the Merlion and the Esplanade) coming under fire and many civilians killed brutally. It is later revealed that the war was fictitious setting of a war-based role-playing game played by Ken Chow (Joshua Tan), a rich and spoiled child reluctant to enlist into National Service. Ken plans to study abroad with his girlfriend Amy (Bong Qiu Ting), but his plans are derailed by NS. After being chided by Amy for his childishness, Ken takes it out on a nearby rubbish bin, to be apprehended by two policemen in the vicinity. A disappointed and embarrassed Amy looked very sad and angry. Back home, after being driven back by his father (Richard Low), Ken confides to his parents about his fears of National Service. His overprotective mother (Irene Ang) decides to help him think of ways to defer, but to no avail. Eventually, they are all forced to face the hard truth - there is no going against the law. The Chow family sadly send off Ken on the day of his enlisting. Thereafter, Ken and a few other recruits are assigned to Ninja Company (Platoon 2, Section 2) and are sent to their bunk and introduced to their Platoon Sergeant (Tosh Zhang), a portrayal of the tough-nails sergeant stereotype. Whilst waiting for the mandatory haircut, Ken gets to know a few people - "Lobang" (Wang Wei Liang), Aloysius Jin Sia-lan (Maxi Lim) and "I.P. Man" (Noah Yap). After two weeks of training, Ken and the other recruits are allowed to book out. A lavish party is thrown to celebrate Ken's return, but his mood is ruined when he is shown a photo of his girlfriend with another man. Ken angrily confronts her and demands that they meet, which she does not agree to. She later admits that she has fallen for another man and dumps Ken on the highway. Determined to regain her love, Ken devises a plan to escape from Pulau Tekong and send her off, for he feels she is merely just testing him. Ken stops drinking water, in hopes to get a heat injury, for which he would be sent home for ten days; he takes the extra measure of sleeping under a ceiling-fan after dousing himself in cold water. However, he gets into a situation worse than expected and he is quickly sent off to a hospital after collapsing during training. Ken's father is alerted of his son's critical condition while in a company meeting. He quickly drives off to the hospital, but the shock and strain is too much and he suffers a stroke while driving and violently collides with another vehicle. Ken wakes up in the next scene, surrounded by his two sisters, in a hospital. He realised his foolish actions have caused problems for many people and cannot bear to face his father, who has survived the car crash and is recuperating in another ward in the same hospital. Awakened to reality, Ken is finally fit enough to go back to training. The film ends at this junction, and snippets of the next part are shown.

During the 1980s, the Korean government created a special summer camp for "gyopo" or foreign-born teenagers where they could spend their summer in Seoul to learn about their motherland. While the intentions of the program were honorable, the activities of the teens were not. The program was eventually canceled after a few years because the government simply could not control the youth.

Based on a true story about one of the summer camps that took place in 1986.

Midnight Journal SP 2018

Adapted from the webtoon "Hasuk 5" (하숙집 5번지) by Penguin (펭귄).

Seven years ago, a mysterious monster was found deep in a rural coal mine. Since then, rumors of a plague spread through the small town, and people experience an unexplainable mental illness. A young Shugendo practitioner goes missing only to resurface transformed, intent on exorcising the world from the monsters haunting it.

Ten years ago, Cheung Sub Sam (Ekin Cheng) and Yo Yo Ma (Charlene Choi) got married to fulfil a promise by their parents, only to fall in love with each other for real regardless of their huge age gap in “My Wife Is 18″. Now, Sam is experiencing midlife crisis while Yo Yo begins to think that her husband is dull, not aggressive enough, and lacks planning. Similarly, Yo Yo’s wilfulness and shopping habit is deemed as immature by Sam. In a twist of events, the couple finds that the priest who certified their marriage is not recognized officially, rendering their marriage invalid. Working as a University lecture in Psychology, Sam meets a new student from Beijing, Tong Yi (Zhang Xinyi), and subsequently falls for her sweet and intelligent personality. On the other side, Yoyo’s life became more boring and aimless, that is, until she runs into her old schoolmate, Lam Shu Ho (Izz Tsui), who has admired her since childhood. But Yo Yo and Sam should find that they long for the past..

In the year 2012, three delinquents including Atsuya discover that their hideout, a run-of-the-mill general store, was owned by an elderly man who gave free advice to worried people through letters. Something weird happens during late hours of the night and Atsuya realizes that a letter will be thrown into the mailbox at midnight. It is a letter asking for advice addressed to the Namiya General Store written by a person 32 years ago. Incredibly, the mailbox was connected to the past, in the year 1980. While confused, Atsuya writes a reply in place of the shopkeeper. The group keeps replying as another letter is sent, then another.

Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into what looks like a rehearsal for global annihilation, as, in a kind of ecstasy, he slaughters a seemingly endless army of attackers both real and phantasmal. The extreme but stylized violence of Okamoto's 1966 film epitomizes a mode of Japanese filmmaking that profoundly influenced such directors as Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, and it would be easy—and not entirely inaccurate—to read the film in the light of the cynical antiheroic trends that surfaced in genre films all over the world in the 1960s and surmise that it represented the same kind of break with heroic tradition as, say, spaghetti westerns. It should be kept in mind, however, that The Sword of Doom was only the most recent episode derived from a long line of stage and film versions of an immensely long, structurally meandering novel that has remained popular ever since the appearance of its first installments a year after the death of the emperor Meiji (the ruler who oversaw Japan's transition from hermetically sealed feudal state to modern industrialized nation), and whose ostensible theme is religious.