Tag Archives: Korean horror

Sound of Silence

Midnight

by Rachel Willis

In the dark and deserted alleys of an unnamed Korean city, Do Shik (Wi Ha-Joon) hunts. His prey is mostly young women, but men are not invulnerable to his violent pursuits.

In writer/director Oh-Seung Kwon film Midnight, two Deaf women (mother and daughter) find themselves in a game of cat and mouse with the manipulative and persistent killer.

From the very beginning, Kwon’s focus is building tension. The gorier aspects of what Do Shik does are left to audience imagination. And by introducing the killer first, Kwon allows us to be privy to the type of games this hunter plays.

After a creepy opening scene, the movie takes a little time to introduce us to our other main characters. Kyung Mi (Ki-joo Jing) works as the Deaf representative in a call center and longs to take a vacation with her mother. We also meet an older brother and younger sister who playfully battle over the sister’s curfew for her blind date. The film moves back and forth between these pairs before reintroducing us to our sadistic killer.

Some of the tension is built upon the things mother and daughter can’t hear. A sticky door lock that, even while pulled slowly, emits an ear-splitting whine. The approach of hurried footsteps from behind. A thrown shoe.  

The second act is the film’s strongest portion. The incompetence of police officers trying to “help” leads to some funny moments, and the reactions of the officers and their inability to understand teeter between hilarity and frustration.

There are also some moments of teeth-grinding tension as the two women find themselves alone and taunted by Do Shik. His threatening words are delivered in low tones and close-lipped sentences, allowing the audience to understand what the two women can’t. Kyung Mi’s mother is not as quick as her innocent daughter to accept that Do Shik is trying to help. She quickly picks up on the contradictions in his attitude, which range from distraught to amusement.

Yet for all the strength of the second act, the movie unravels in the final segment. Suspension of disbelief is tested with some truly questionable character decisions. Though the tension carries over from the middle section, it’s hard to maintain when you’re too busy wondering why certain characters behave the way they do.

A disappointing climax muddies the film’s overall effect and overshadows the message. However, there’s enough working for this tense and exciting thriller to entertain even the most skeptical viewer.   

Undead Again

Train to Busan: Peninsula

by Hope Madden

Back in 2016, filmmaker Sang-ho Yeon made the most thrilling zombie film since 28 Days Later. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, always exciting and at least once a heartbreaker, Train to Busan succeeded on every front.

You can’t chalk it up to newness, either. Busan was actually a sequel to Yeon’s fascinating animated take on Korea’s zombie infestation, Seoul Station. So the guy was 2 for 2 in gripping zombie thrills.

Can he make it a hat trick?

Train to Busan: Peninsula begins on that same fateful day that South Korea falls to the zombipocalypse. Those fleeing Korea by ship are turned around for fear of global contamination, so all survivors descend upon Hong Kong. Four years later, the city’s overrun, survivors are living in poverty, and a rag tag bunch is so desperate, they’re willing to go back to the Korean peninsula to pull a job that will make them rich.

But if Hong Kong looks bad, wait til they see what’s happened since they left the peninsula.

Things feel much more borrowed this time around. Peninsula plays like a mash up of Friedkin’s 1977 adventure Sorcerer (or Clouzot’s 1953 Wages of Fear) and the 4th in George Romero’s line of zombie adventures, 2005’s Land of the Dead. There’s also a little Dawn of the Dead, plus one scene lifted wholesale from 28 Days Later. And you cannot miss a great deal of a great number of Mad Max flicks.

Both the claustrophobia and the relentless forward momentum of the 2016 film are gone, replaced with tactical maneuvering around a fairly stagey looking city scape and military compound. And while you have to believe Yeon had a bigger budget to work with based on the success of his previous effort, Peninsula’s zombie effects are weaker here.

That’s not to say the film is bad, just a letdown. Dong-Won Gang makes for a serviceable quietly haunted hero. Scrappy Re Lee and adorable Ye-Won Lee infuse the film with vibrance and fun, and both Gyo-hwan Koo and Min-Jae Kim create respectably reprehensible villains. (Although the high water mark in zombie villainy was reached with Train to Busan.)

The story is tight, if highly borrowed, and the action scenes are plentiful. Compare it with nearly every other zombie film to come out in the last two decades and it’s a creepy way to spend a couple of hours. Compare it to Yeon’s last two movies, though, and it comes up lacking.  

Halloween Countdown, Day 21: I Saw The Devil

I Saw the Devil (2010)

If you’ve seen Korea’s awe-inspiring 2003 export Oldboy, you know actor Min-sik Choi can take a beating. He proves his masochistic mettle again in I Saw the Devil.

Choi plays Kyung-Chul, a predator who picks on the wrong guy’s fiancé.

That grieving fiancé Soo-hyeon Kim is played by Byung-hun Lee (The Magnificent Seven), whose restrained emotion and elegant good looks perfectly offset Choi’s disheveled explosion of sadistic rage, and we spend 2+ hours witnessing their wildly gruesome game of cat and mouse.

Director Jee-woon Kim, working with Hoon-jung Park’s screenplay, breathes new life into the serial killer formula. Seven years earlier he helmed the deep, murky and intensely female horror of Tale of Two Sisters, but Devil breathes masculinity.

With the help of two strong leads, he upends the old “if I want to catch evil, I must become evil” cliché. What they’ve created is a percussively violent horror show that transcends its gory content to tell a fascinating, if repellant, tale.

Kyung-Chul – part time school bus driver, full time psychopath – butchers Kim’s gal, but rather than killing the murderer when he gets the chance, Kim beats him within an inch of his life (in very graphic fashion), then implants a microphone and tracking device. Regardless of the mayhem this lunatic will unleash as soon as he recovers from his wounds, Kim’s content to simply wait, follow, and beat him up again.

Park’s plot takes a number of unexpected, even absurd, turns. It’s as if this particular movie stops off quickly to visit a couple of completely separate horror films. The result doesn’t always work, but it certainly shakes up expectations.

Truth be told, beneath the grisly, far-too-realistic violence of this unwholesome bloodletting is an undercurrent of honest human pathos – not just sadism, but sadness, anger, and the most weirdly dark humor.

If you can see past the outrageously violent images onscreen, you might notice some really fine acting and nimble storytelling lurking inside this bloodbath.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!





Halloween Countdown, Day 15: Oldboy

Oldboy (2003)

So a guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that the guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

This is not a horror film in any traditional sense – not even in South Korean cinema’s extreme sense. Though it was embraced – and rightly so – by horror circles, this is a refreshing and compelling take on the revenge fantasy that drags you places you do not expect to go. But that’s the magnificence of Chan-wook Park, and if you have the stomach, you should follow where he leads.

Released in 2003 and remade (BADLY) ten years later, the film’s secrets have likely been spilled by this point. One of the miraculous things about Oldboy is that, even if you know the twists that lie ahead, you cannot imagine how Park will reveal and execute them.

And if you don’t know, all the better

Choi is unforgettable as the film’s anti-hero, and his disheveled explosion of emotion is perfectly balanced by the elegantly evil Ji-tae Yu.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!





Trust Issues

The Wailing

by Hope Madden

“Why are you troubled,” Jesus asked, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see — for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

Biblical quotes are a common, often effective way to open a horror film. Of course, they usually come from Revelation or contain some other wrath-of-God kind of sentiment. Don’t be fooled, though, because South Korean writer/director Hong-jin Na knows where he’s doing with his third genre-bending epic, The Wailing – even if you don’t.

Though the true meaning of this quote won’t take hold until the final act, it presents many questions. Is this film supernatural? Demonic? Or, given the corporeal nature of the quote, is it rooted in the human flesh?

Yes.

That’s what makes the quote so perfect. Na meshes everything together in this bucolic horror where superstition and religion blend. The film echoes with misery, as the title suggests. The filmmaker throws every grisly thing at you – zombies, pustules, demonic possession, police procedural, multiple homicides – and yet keeps it all slippery with overt comedy.

In rural Korea, lackadaisical police sergeant Jong-gu (Do-won Kwak) is baffled by the rash of ugly homicides striking the village. And they are ugly – not only because of their brutality, but because of the boil-covered state of each perpetrator.

Some locals blame toxic mushrooms, but others say it’s the work of that solitary foreigner (Jun Kunimura) who recently moved to the outskirts of town.

Backwater beliefs, small town hysteria, mob mentality – or is it? The filmmaker toys with your preconceived notions, partly by crafting Jong-gu – with the help of the dramatically agile Kwak – into an endearingly flawed hero. A comically bumbling cop, Jong-gu’s sudden appreciation of the seriousness of the situation only amplifies tensions because he – like the audience – is in over his head. As he puzzles through clues in an attempt to save his stricken daughter (an amazing Hwan-hee Kim), Na’s feats of misdirection come to an unbearable head.

The languid pace, which makes the most of DP Kyung-pyo Hong’s gorgeous photography, may feel like needless expansion, but it serves to let images and questions settle. It lets the misery soak in a bit.

Verdict-4-0-Stars





Fright Club: Best Korean Horror

It’s time again to travel the globe and pull together a list of the best in horror to be found, this time in the ripe ground of Korea. Just a decade or two ago, Korea’s horror output tended to feel like an echo of Japan’s cinema, but by the early 2000s, a number of truly wonderful filmmakers began working in the genre and the outcome has been a breathtaking onslaught of the most extreme kind. Hooray!

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

5. Bedevilled (2010)
Cheol-soo Jang’s first feature film bears witnesses not only to some horrific deeds, but to an amazingly confident new filmmaker who knows how to sidestep expectations, turn the screw, and offer surprising insight in a genre that doesn’t always generate that kind of thoughtfulness.

The film opens as beautiful if cold Hae-won (Sung-won Ji) witnesses a crime and chooses not to involve herself. She takes a (somewhat involuntary) vacation on the remote island where she grew up, to find her childhood friend Bok-nam (Young-hee Seo). On the isolated, backward island – though Hae-won is treated to rest and nurturing by her adoring friend – Bok-nam’s life is about as far from ideal as possible.

Jang captures the rugged, isolated beauty of the island and offsets both ideas with his leads – one, an elegant and pristine beauty, the other a rough-hewn image – and sees two sides of the same humanity. This is a morality tale, but it’s also a brutal but sympathetic (and seriously bloody) comeuppance. Jang does not leave off where you think he might, instead crafting a compelling and satisfying whole that will stick with you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbSZqvDvOFs

4. The Host (2006)
Visionary director Joon-ho Bong’s film opens in a military lab hospital in 2000. A clearly insane American doctor, repulsed by the dust coating formaldehyde bottles, orders a Korean subordinate to empty it all into the sink. Soon the contents of hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde find its way through the Korean sewer system and into the Han River. This event – allegedly based on fact – eventually leads, not surprisingly, to some pretty gamey drinking water. And also a 25 foot cross between Alien and a giant squid.

Said monster – let’s call him Steve Buscemi (the beast’s actual on-set nickname) – exits the river one bright afternoon in 2006 to run amuck in a very impressive outdoor-chaos-and-bloodshed scene. A dimwitted foodstand clerk witnesses his daughter’s abduction by the beast, and the stage is set.

What follows, rather than a military attack on a marauding Steve Buscemi, is actually one small, unhappy, bickering family’s quest to find and save the little girl. Their journey takes them to poorly organized quarantines, botched security check points, misguided military/Red Cross posts, and through Seoul’s sewer system, all leading to a climactic battle even more impressive than the earlier scene of afternoon chaos.

3. I Saw the Devil (2010)
An actor who can take a beating, Min-sik Choi plays Kyung-Chul, a predator who picks on the wrong guy’s fiancé.

That grieving fiancé is played by Byung-hun Lee, whose restrained emotion and elegant good looks perfectly offset Choi’s disheveled explosion of sadistic rage, and we spend 2+ hours witnessing their wildly gruesome game of cat and mouse.

Director Jee-woon Kim breathes new life into the serial killer formula. With the help of two strong leads, he upends the old “if I want to catch evil, I must become evil” cliché. What they’ve created is a percussively violent horror show that transcends its gory content to tell a fascinating, if repellant, tale.

Truth be told, beneath the grisly, far-too-realistic violence of this unwholesome bloodletting is an undercurrent of honest human pathos – not just sadism, but sadness, anger, and the most weirdly dark humor. You might even notice some really fine acting and nimble storytelling lurking inside this bloodbath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2h52riooIc

2. Oldboy (2003)

So a guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that the guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Min-sik Choi (remember him?). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

This is not a horror film in any traditional sense – not even in South Korean cinema’s extreme sense. Though it was embraced – and rightly so – by horror circles, this is a refreshing and compelling take on the revenge fantasy that takes you places you do not expect to go. But that’s the magnificence of Chan-wook Park, and if you have the stomach, you should follow where he leads.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

1. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.

Kim also directed I Saw the Devil, but where Devil breathes masculinity, Tale is a deep, murky, and intensely female horror.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.





Day 4: A Tale of Two Sisters

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Kim Jee-Woon‘s A Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.

Kim would go on to direct the also outstanding, although entirely different, I Saw the Devil, but where Devil breathes masculinity, Tale of Two Sisters is a deep, murky, and intensely female horror.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.

Tale masters the slow reveal in large and small ways. Whether you’ve begun to unravel the big mystery or not, Tale always has something else up its sleeve. Or, under its table.

Listen weekly to MaddWolf’s horror podcast FRIGHT CLUB. Do it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQV7ejqpbPc





Halloween Countdown, Day 6

Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.

Kim would go on to direct the also outstanding, although entirely different, I Saw the Devil, but where Devil breathes masculinity, Tale of Two Sisters is a deep, murky, and intensely female horror.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

Tale masters the slow reveal, and the dinner party scene is a pivotal one for that reason. One of the great things about this picture is the fact that Tale always has something else up its sleeve. Or, under its table.

The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.