Has MTV lost the pulse of its teenage demographic? Presented with a crazed Korean extravaganza called Whasango, the network chose to pull a Sid Sheinberg and remove 41 minutes, slather on maudlin narration, and force the Byzantine plot to make sense. The problem is not so much that the movie now conforms to logic, but that a lack thereof better reflects adolescent experience: as anyone of parents born knows, high school is as brutal and nonsensical as a Joseph Heller novel. With the right dubbing, Whasango could play like crazy with a young audience, because its hilariously atavistic send-up echoes the teenage experience; taming it, MTV-style, sucks out its limitless appeal.

The good news is that no one's suppressed the original version of Volcano High--in fact, the flipside to the MTV re-edit on Fox's DVD contains the uncut Whasango. Thus you get the full flower of insanity as the filmmakers immerse you in a dystopian educational environment where the teachers have fought a long war and chaos reigns in the high-school halls. The extra-curricular sports teams are forever beating up on each other, a dicey thing when certain members--like weightlifting captain Jang Ryang (Kim Soo-Roh), the self-appointed BMOC with the deadly grip--are super-powered. The farting, laissez-faire principal is fairly unconcerned with general order, but that doesn't mean the uptight VP (Byun Hee-Bong) isn't: seeking the sacred text that will release the education world from chaos, he poisons the head man and installs a bunch of humourless supercharged bullies to teach the recalcitrant students.

The audience surrogate is hapless Kim Kyong-su (Jang Hyuk), whose own powers (acquired in a mishap with lightning and eels) are basically a metaphor for an adolescent coming to sexual maturity. He naturally can't control his newfound strength, and has thus been thrown out of nine schools for various enraged smash-ups; he feels he must suppress his abilities, but this being aimed at kids, there's no way that's going to happen. Much as he tries to avoid confrontation with Jang Ryang and the new regime, he's got to stand up for every hormonally-challenged teenager who ever walked the face of the earth--meaning fists will fly and teacher-ass will be kicked.

The narrative is a great deal more labyrinthine than that, complete with Tolkien-esque backstory and crazy brinkmanship between the clubs that loathe Jang Ryang and his reign of terror. In fact, there's no way to absorb it all in one viewing, preoccupied as Whasango is with screaming fights and general chaos. The point of the film is to evoke the insane cruelty that goes on behind school walls without condescension or heaviness, which results in something akin to The Matrix as directed by Savage Steve Holland. It's impious and deflationary like no recent movie I can think of, and so much happens at such a breakneck clip that it's hard to resist even when you're not sure what's actually going on.

And what does MTV do with this bugfuck classic? Naturally, they dumb it down. Volcano High is shorn of its deranged mythology, decorated with non-existent subplots and simplified by distilling extant subplots, and otherwise overexplained by treacly narration that makes Jiminy Cricket look like Richard Hell. We're supposed to forgive this because the hip-hop likes of Big Boi, Andre 3000, Snoop Dogg, and Method Man have redubbed the picture (with new, terrible dialogue), but as not a one of them actually rhymes, they may as well be reading a grade-school primer. There's no denying that the film is coherent in this form--blandly, lifelessly coherent, without the purity of madness that gives Whasango its appeal. Still, it's heartening to see Fox to let us compare for ourselves, as it shows that the purists who won't stand for the re-edit are finally seen as a marketing force to be feared.

Both incarnations of Volcano High are presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen and look quite sharp, for the most part, with the muted steel-blue palette coming through in its many dimensions. Unfairly, the MTV bowdlerization is rendered in DD 5.1 while the Korean cut--blessed with DTS audio on virtually every international DVD release of the film--is in 2.0 stereo, but the joke is on MTV there, too: the Korean track sounds much sharper and more potent than the recut, itself a soup of ADR and bombast that is listenable but hardly memorable. The only major extra is a 13-minute making-of featurette in which the various hip-hop stars record their lines and offer uninspired takes on the characters they voice. Fans of the superstars will want to give it a look, though I can't imagine who else could possibly care.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover