Review: “Lifetime” is an American cable broadcasting station that specializes in made for TV dramas and reruns of female oriented sitcoms. In fact, Lifetime’s major demographic would appear to be limited almost solely to that of bored house wives whose repetitive, lack-luster existences have left them longing for a temporary escape from the mundane trappings of domesticated life.

Over time, I have done my best to avoid this so called “entertainment for women” when at all possible, but coming from a family where the women often out number the men, I have unfortunately seen more than my fair share of “Golden Girls” reruns and “Designing Women” holiday specials. I had assumed that our neighbors to the East had not been plagued with such a nauseating waste of cable, but after seeing “301, 302” I cannot help but believe that South Korea has sprouted its own alternative to this western tinged, estrogen soaked fiasco.

“301, 302” must have been one of those made for TV movie scripts that was a bit to risqué for the audiences of the west. It has all of the elements that typically make those Lifetime movies what they are. You’ve got two, bitter, single women, each with a troubled past, who eventually form a bond, despite their differences. There is also flashbacks aplenty, showing us just where their emotional baggage derives. This one, though, packs something a little different with the additional angle of the mysterious disappearance of one of the women. While I can really only assume this, I would be willing to wager that in the history of Lifetime Originals, one never had a plot that dealt with habitual vomiting, frozen children, and doggie soufflé. Well, at least not all at once.

Plot points aside, this film has more condemning it than just the fact that members of the masculine persuasion most likely wont relate. There is also the incredibly poor pacing of the film. After the opening establishes our main heroines, we spend an unnecessarily long amount of time dealing with each character’s past. Something that would usually be totally acceptable, if not expected in this type of film, but this time around, the sequences tend to maintain an out of place, dreamy, flashback-like atmosphere, which borders on becoming disorienting more than once through the course of the film.

Through my experiences with Korean cinema, I have found that even if a film is bad in terms of plot, it at least tends to have an aesthetically appealing look. Unfortunately, “301, 302” was made in 1995, a time before the wonderful era that we have all come to associate with when thinking of the Korean cinema boom. Shot in full screen (or perhaps only converted to such for the release of the DVD), the visual appearance of this film only adds to the cheap, made for TV look of the production. Don’t even get me started on the fact that the DVD’s transfer is unmistakably an unaltered VHS copy.