Tag: Well Go USA

The Wild (더 와일드: 야수들의 전쟁, Kim Bong-han, 2023)

Posted on by

Who’s fault really is it? The hero of Kim Bong-han’s The Wild (더 와일드: 야수들의 전쟁, The Wild: Yasoodeului Jeonjaeng) goes to prison for seven years after the guy he was fighting in an illegal boxing match dies. But later he discovers that his friend and gang boss Do-sik (Oh Dae-Hwan) drugged his opponent first to assist in their match fixing scam, leaving a question mark about who was finally responsible for the young man’s death. It’s this confusing web of causality which damns each of the protagonists each in their own way seeking an impossible escape from the past. 

The first thing that Woo-cheol (Park Sung-Woong) says when he gets out of prison is that he wants to lead a quiet life, refusing Do-sik’s offer to give him a bar in compensation for his long years inside. Yet Woo-cheol is quickly pulled back into the gangster underworld after bonding with a young sex worker, Myung-joo (Seo Ji-Hye), who also happens to be the former girlfriend of the man he killed. This brings him into conflict with corrupt cop Jeong-gon (Joo Suk-Tae) who is working with Do-sik to take out the middle man in their smuggling operation which is largely handled by North Korean defectors. 

There may be something in the positioning of Gaku-su (Oh Dal-Su) and Woo-cheol as outsiders trapped by circumstance, yet the North Koreans otherwise depicted are all worst than the gangsters knowing only violence, recrimination, and rapaciousness. Putting up with them tries Woo-cheol’s patience and puts him at odds with Do-sik while disrupting the power play that has emerged between him and his underling Yoon-jae (Jung Soo-Kyo). Later in the film, another man calls them fools for being so obedient when the facts is that dogs never abandon their owners but are often abandoned by them. With so many concurrent schemes in motion, relationships are generally a weakness and it becomes impossible to know who can be trusted or what side anyone is on. 

That’s a dilemma that strikes right at the heart of Myung-joo who is attracted to Woo-cheol’s manly nobility but also conflicted and later pursued by her late boyfriend’s younger brother who blames her for his brother’s death insisting that he only participated in the fight because he wanted money to move out so they could live together. Then again perhaps it was the mother’s fault for refusing him the money when he asked for it. Everything that happens is really everyone’s and no one’s fault, just a fatalistic motion towards an unstoppable end game. Do-sik prides himself on being able to make his own fate, but even he is carried along by forces outside of his control never quite as much in charge of his destiny as he’d like to think. 

Meanwhile, he takes out his sense of futility on those around him. An intensely homosocial tale about the corrupted brotherhood between a series of men, the film has an unpleasant streak of deeply ingrained misogyny with strong depictions of sexualised violence and rape. Aside from Mrs Han, the feisty boss in charge of the girls who is later punished for her attempt to stand up to the men’s bad behaviour, the women are afforded little agency with Myung-joo reduced to little more than a tool used and manipulated by various plotters while like Woo-cheol longing to live a quiet life. Life him, she is dragged down by her guilt and trauma unable to escape her past. Do-sik, meanwhile, dreams of leaving this small-town world for the bright lights of Seoul but perhaps makes too great a calculation and finds himself outmanoeuvred by unexpected betrayal.

The film’s Korean title dubs the conflict between the men as a war between beasts, while it’s true enough that each of them is embroiled in a fiery hell preemptively looking for revenge before the threat has arisen. Romance and loyalty lead only to death and disappointment. A melancholy Do-sik asks Woo-cheol if they’re still friends and though it’s unclear if the question is genuine, seems to be harbouring a degree of regret in the coldness of his plotting either willing to sacrifice lifelong friendship or sure that those bonds are too secure to be broken. In any case, you cannot outrun fate nor find refuge from its ravages, only attempt to embrace its bitter ironies.

The Wild is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Wolf Pack (狼群, Michael Chiang, 2022)

Posted on by

A disillusioned doctor quickly finds himself in over his head when he’s kidnapped by Chinese mercenaries in Michael Chiang’s oddly positioned action thriller, Wolf Pack (狼群, láng qún). Once again, the action takes place in a completely fictional Middle Eastern/Central Asian country with the mercenaries playing mysterious spy games in which their heartless amorality is at least heavily implied to be an affectation and that they are ultimately interested in “more than money” while covertly protecting Chinese interests abroad.

The film heavily implies that they are in fact in some way working for the Chinese authorities with a lengthy focus on the Chinese flag outside the place of government in this foreign nation given the unlikely name of Cooley (in fact, most of the names given for various people and places seem mildly inappropriate). The photograph sullen doctor Ke Tong (Aarif Rahman) carries around also features his father in a Chinese military uniform which might be why he is so reluctant to believe that he may also have been a member of this “private army” as his new boss Diao claims. Though Ke Tong is originally very hostile to Diao’s gang who have after all kidnapped him he later undergoes an entirely unexplained change of heart accepting that his father must have had his reasons for whatever he did so Diao is probably OK anyway. 

In any case, their current mission involves defending Chinese energy interests against a local warlord who is working with European businessmen to disrupt a gas deal by placing faulty regulators designed to engineer an explosion which will apparently domino all the way back to the Mainland. Largely kept in the dark, Ke Tong is unable to see the big picture and keeps trying to help by doing righteous things such as shooting at a soldier hassling a young girl whose father he’d just killed but unwittingly making everything worse. Eventually he realises that the end client must be the Xingli group who are running the China-Cooley collaborative gas field, though even the energy official they’re later asked to protect seems to be prepared to die in order to ensure the project’s success and prevent a mass explosion. 

Diao’s selflessness is also well signalled thanks to his tendency to listen to a recording of a baby crying and meditate on “all he’s lost” to be a mercenary which again reinforces the idea that they have a greater cause than simply money along with Diao’s position as a surrogate father not just to Ke Tong but to the other soldiers who are all, it is said, looking for a place to belong. The gang apparently also have some kind of role funding orphanages in China to prove that they aren’t just in it for the cash. Ke Tong too comes to feel a kind of brotherhood that makes the mission more than just mercenary activity and gives him an excuse to chase the evil war lord even though that is not part of their mission and really the villagers, including a small child who has been forced to do their bidding, are not their concern. 

Despite starring two prominent martial arts stars, the film is much more focussed on technical wizardry and gunplay than it is on physical fights save for a late in the game confrontation between female mercenary Monstrosity and her opposing number as they try to liberate the gas field. Diao’s incredibly well equipped crew appear to be almost all-powerful, even if Ke Tong manages to play them at their own game, using fly-shaped drones to assist them in their work though the final mission involves an improbable plot device of the local government needing to sign a document by retinal scan within 60 seconds complete with an onscreen countdown via an encrypted briefcase computer in the middle of a firefight. 

Chiang does indeed bring action with a series of high impact sequences one involving a large petrol tank explosion which results in several of the warlord’s men being engulfed in flames. It does however leave a thread of mystery hanging over Ke Tong’s quest to solve the riddle of his father’s death with the suggestion that not all of his body parts were collected hinting that there may be further conspiracies in store for a potential sequel though what seems clear is that Ke Tong has discovered his place to belong alongside a surrogate father figure doing quite questionable things but apparently working for the national good. 

Wolf Pack is released on blu-ray in the US on 23rd January courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Flying Swordsman (雪山飞狐之塞北宝藏, Qiao Lei, 2022)

Posted on by

Close to the conclusion of Qiao Lei’s The Flying Swordsman (雪山飞狐之塞北宝藏, xuěshān fēi hú zhī Sàiběi bǎozàng), the latest adaptation of Jin Yong’s classic wuxia novel Fox Volent of the Snowy Mountain, the villain is reminded that his quest for treasure is a headlong plunge into an abyss and it is indeed greed that eventually seals his fate. In any case, the karmic wheel is very much in motion as the sins of the past will soon catch up to him.

In a brief prologue, Lord Tian hopes to get his hands on some treasure buried deep beneath a land of cold and so engineers a duel between the treasure’s guardian Hu Yidao and the only swordsman who can match him. The two men end up killing each other, but largely due to the machinations of ambitious underling Baoshu (Chunyu Shanshan) who has poisoned their swords with arsenic. Additionally he’s massacred a local village, something of which the head of their group Tao Baisui (Raymond Lui Leung-wai) does not approve, but still didn’t get his hands on an iron box containing a map to the treasure nor the key needed to open it.

The box then turns up 10 years later but causes nothing other than chaos and discord among Baisui’s followers as they all jockey to get their hands on both the map and the key though the clever part of the plan is that no one has both at the same time ensuring the continuation of infighting and betrayal. The sad thing is that both Baisui and Baoshu are childless and have come to regard their underlings as children though they are quickly sacrificed during the internecine plotting. Gui Yu (Zhao Huawei), a mercenary picked up by Baoshu’s henchwoman Qingwen (Chen Yusi) after escaping enslavement at a coal mine, seems to vacillate, playing advantages against each side but also manipulated by both and left to die after being poisoned. Apparently each of the other eight villains has a special talent, though Gui Yu appears to have none and often claims to be doing only what he needs to survive which fair enough given the vagaries of the feudal era. 

This world is indeed quite grim, as we can see from the guy hacking up some suspicious looking meat on the way into the fort. An assassin is fond of asking if the target thinks villains never face retribution, hinting at the degree of hubris in Baoshu’s ambition and his lack of thought for the future or the various ways the karmic wheel may turn against him. His downfall is caused by greed, but then there’s also a degree of tenderness in his relationship with adopted daughter Qingwen who is often dismissed as a “little beauty” even if he at times seems willing to sacrifice her life for relatively little gain. 

In any case, the treasure becomes something of a MacGuffin, merely an unattainable object that drives the villains mad and turns them against each other or alternately can be used to manipulate them. In this supernaturally tinged world, the band come up against strange monsters including a pack of wild hyenas amid the freezing cold and otherwise have managed to keep their special powers more or less secret from each other despite their long association giving Qiao frequent opportunities for plot twists and unexpected returns. He adds to the mythological fantasy aesthetic through the forest-bound vistas of trees in bloom along with the endless snowscapes that reflect the moral and emotional emptiness of men like Baoshu. 

Karma does indeed come back to bite him, a victim of a poetic revenge destroyed by his own greed and immorality. Amid all the infighting there is a genuine degree of solidarity to be found at least among those robbed by the evils of feudalism and hoping to avenge themselves through tricking the gang into destroying itself. Qiao’s wire-heavy action sequences hint at a poetic beauty of wuxia martial arts even if close combat is necessarily brutal though mostly relying on trickery rather than simple skill with the sword. Told over a series of flashbacks, the tale eventually straightens itself out to reveal the tragic legacies that provoke the fate of all long after those who caused them have forgotten their dark deeds and believed themselves free from guilt or consequences.

The Flying Swordsman is released in the US on Digital and DVD on Jan. 9 courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

The Ghost Station (옥수역귀신, Jeong Yong-ki, 2022)

Posted on by

The biggest evil at the centre of Jeong Yong-ki’s homage to classic J-horror The Ghost Station (옥수역귀신, Ogsuyeog Gwisin) is perhaps capitalism or more simply modernity. At least, it stands to reason that those covering up a great evil for financial gain could be deemed even worse than the person who actually committed the crimes in turning a blind eye to injustice. It’s in the midst of this paradox that jaded rookie reporter Na-young (Kim Bo-ra) finds herself while beginning to uncover the dark secrets buried beneath a supposedly “haunted” station though mostly lured by the desire for easy clickbait to appease her hardline boss (Kim Su-jin). 

The reason that Na-young is in trouble, is that she was at the station snapping photos for social media without bothering to get a written release from her subjects. The person she took photos of turned out to be transgender and was accidentally outed by Na-young’s story for which she feels little remorse, mostly feeling sorry for herself on realising her job’s on the line and she’ll have to bring in some powerful scoops if she wants to make sure the paper has her back and will cover the compensation money if the woman sues her. 

It has to be said that, in the English subtitles at least, the film has a strongly transphobic vibe in which the photographed woman is constantly described as “a man” , using male pronouns and otherwise treated as a figure of fun, just another “weird” thing going on at the station. Even so, there’s clearly a mild rebuke intended against the contemporary trend of mocking strangers online with a young man falling victim to the station curse in the opening sequence after uploading a video of a woman he first assumes to be drunk or mentally distressed before noticing that in the video he can see a pair of bloody hands attacking her. 

Na-young has been doing pretty much the same kinds of things with her clickbait even while resentful of herself and the loss of her journalistic integrity working at a low level tabloid only interested in viral articles that will generate ad income. But she’s also slightly proud on spotting people reading her pieces on the station ghost as they ride, feeling like she’s doing real investigative journalism even if no one in the office really cares about the dark secrets lurking in the station. Even she later realises that she lost sight of the victim in the case and hadn’t even thought about contacting his family or trying to find out who he was and why he died. 

What she eventually discovers is that her paper may have been involved in a coverup operation which is why her boss becomes hostile as her reports become a little too “real”. It was in the interests of powerful people that the station be built, so anything that might delay its construction was quietly swept under the carpet. Na-young wants to drag it into the light, but finds herself frustrated and then at the centre of a supernatural curse while hoping to give voice to those who were denied any of their own. 

The quietly oppressive, haunting nature of these unseen forces is brought home by the ominous tapping of the ice blue fingernails of Na-young’s ever impatient boss perhaps embittered by her own decision to abandon journalistic integrity for the lure of easy money peddling gossip and distraction to an already apathetic readership. Though adapted from a web toon, the film is co-scripted by Hiroshi Takahashi and bears many of the hallmarks of classic J-horror including the presence of a well implying the contamination of the groundwater that feeds the contemporary society which the station itself in someways represents, along with the uncanny movement of living ghosts in the contemporary environment.

Like J-horror it finds otherworldly spirits trying to communicate through modern technology, in this case saying what first seem to be fragments of a phone number but turn out to have a different meaning indicating a desire to be heard and recognised, reprieved from the hell in which they’ve been placed by a cruel and heartless tormentor. Na-young thinks she can give them that but is perhaps naive, if already corrupted, overestimating the power of the press to offer corrective justice and end a curse by throwing the truth into the light. In the end, she too decides to pass the buck escaping the curse by passing it on as an ironic act of vengeance and liberation thrown like a bomb at an infinitely corrupt social system but more out of spite than retribution. A little shallow and cynical, the film never quite lands its punches or achieves the eeriness it’s looking for but does nevertheless point the finger at the literal skeletons in the closet of the contemporary society.

The Ghost Station is out now in the US on Digital, DVD, and blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, Yang Bingjia, 2022)

Posted on by

A blind swordsman takes revenge against the evils of feudal society in Yang Bingjia’s impressively helmed action drama, Eye For An Eye: The Blind Swordsman (目中无人, mùzhōngwúrén). Set in the “lawless” society of the Tang era following the Tianbao rebellion, the film has a western sensibility with its twanging guitar score and dusty roads not to mention jumped up gangsters trying to get a foothold in the legitimate order simply because they have become too powerful and no one is willing to resist them. 

Ni Yan (Gao Weiman), a young tavern woman who lost her brother and husband when her wedding was attacked by the Yuwen clan asks for nothing more than “justice” but that’s something no one can give her. Wandering swordsman Cheng Yi (Mo Tse) who’d taken a liking to her because she offered him some of her wine and even gave some to his horse reports the crime to the local magistrate after claiming the bounty on a fugitive, only he tells her directly that he will do nothing because the Yuwen clan have already moved beyond justice and not even he will touch them. 

In a way, Cheng is depicted as a failed revolutionary and his blindness a symbol his despair in a world he no longer cares to see. A bounty hunter by trade, his work is facilitated by old comrade Lady Qin (Zhang Qin) who, in contrast to him, seems to live a cheerful life repairing musical instruments while much loved in the town around her. Though they pretend to be saving money for an operation to restore Cheng’s sight, their line of work is perhaps cynical in taking advantage of the times while accidentally outsourcing a justice the authorities can no longer provide in the weakened Tang society. The Yuwen have infiltrated most institutions and cultivated relationships with important people that allow them to ride roughshod over ordinary citizens who are now completely at their mercy.

There might be something quietly subversive in these references to a corrupt and authoritarian institution which tries to brand Ni Yani the criminal in her pleas for justice, insisting that she admit to killing her brother herself in resentment of his criminal past while he is also hunted by the Yuwen because he knows to much about their dodgy dealings including raiding tombs to get precious gems to use as bargaining chips in a dynastic marriage negotiation. Cheng Yi did not originally want to get involved, himself too cynical and having given up hope of “justice” in this “lawless” society, but finds himself sympathetic towards Ni Yan because of the kindness she showed him and the obvious suffering her ordeal has inflicted on her. 

In a sense, his eyes are opened to the injustice of the society around him to which he had been wilfully blind if ironically accepting that he will never see again. He alone is willing to stand up to the Yuwen while even within their ranks petty resentments are growing as a princeling grows ambitious to escape his own oppression at the hands of an authoritarian brother who berates him for his weakness. 

Despite the budgetary issues which often plague straight to streaming cinema, Yang’s elegantly lensed drama brings a real sense of place to the dusty provincial towns where Cheng plies his trade along with the ornate elegance of the realm of Lady Qin whose flowing robes belie her military past. Drawing inspiration from the western as well as Japanese genre classics such as Yojimbo the film presents a world in decay in which the wandering swordsman becomes a moral authority, delivering justice if for a price. The irony is that it isn’t money which opens his eyes, but the reclaimed ability to see with his heart in deciding to help Ni Yan in her quest to avenge the deaths of those close to her. A series of excellently choreographed and well-shot action scenes along with Yang’s post-modern take on the material lend this tale of wandering swordsmen and feudal abuses a sense of the legendary that hints at further adventures for wandering sword for hire Cheng Yi bringing his own brand of justice to a lawless place. 

Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman is out in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on 28th November courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, Simon Zhao & Xu Shixing, 2020)

Posted on by

Monster movie streamer Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, jù è dǎo) became a surprise hit in the early days of the pandemic as people increasingly preferred to entertain themselves at home, though of course in a way it may be somehow comforting to see people battle more obvious threats that they can actually see and physically resist. In any case, the film never promises much more than its nature as fodder for online streaming would suggest while admittedly pinching plot elements from other similarly themed movies such Train to Busan and positioning the central conflict as effective paternity rather than the monster itself.

A brief prologue finds American pilots flying through the Dragon Triangle during the Second World War while ominously carrying cargo labeled as containing dangerous radiation though the reason they later crash on an uncharted island is that they are suddenly attacked by what appear to be pterodactyls. Nevertheless, the radiation is later given as an explanation as to why all the creatures on the island have evolved into huge and terrifying monsters including the titular crocodile.

Flash forward to the present day and grumpy middle-aged man Lin Hao (Gallen Lo Ka-leung) is escorting his estranged 19-year-old daughter Yiyi (Liao Yinyue) home to China following the sudden death of her mother in Australia where the pair had been living. Yiyi has secretly been accompanied by her university student boyfriend Cheng Jie (Wang Bingxiang) of whom Lin clearly does not approve, not yet able to shift his perspective on the daughter he hadn’t seen in five years to realise she is no longer a little girl. Family bonding will however have to wait as the plane they’re travelling on alongside a pregnant lady and her husband, an influencer, and an obnoxious man travelling home for a heart transplant, is pulled into Dragon’s Triangle by magnetic interference and crash lands on the island where several of the survivors are quickly swallowed by the crocodile. 

Those who remain are therefore faced with a series of dilemmas as to whether to help each other or prioritise their own survival with Cao Fang (He Qiwei), the heart transplant candidate, actively pushing several of his fellow passengers towards the crocodile so that he can get away. Lin meanwhile quickly takes charge and is more or less unchallenged as they try to explore the island in search of clues hoping that the radio equipment in the ‘40s plane they read about in a diary one of the pilots left behind will allow them to make contact through the outdated tech of radio waves. 

This is might be something of a plot hole seeing as it obviously didn’t work for the American pilot though perhaps there just weren’t any ships in range given the circumstances, and it seems he too might have come to a sticky end. But thanks to his sudden promotion to father of the group, Lin begins to reassess his role as a father to Yiyi in beginning to cede ground and actually listen to some of her ideas along with accepting support from Cheng Jie to help him protect her not lease because he realises he may not survive. There are also a few other giant and very hungry monsters on the island who in this case turn out to be more of a threat than other people who with the exception of Cao Fang are more community minded than individualistic. 

A mild social message is conveyed through Yiyi’s eventual discarding of the cigarettes she secretly smoked, symbolising the end of her rebellion and the re-acceptance of her father along with his patriarchal authority as if shifting back onto the right path thanks to the experience of fighting a giant crocodile together and realising that he really did stay to protect her instead of just going off on his own. Some undeniably ropey special effects and a general lack of coherence in the film’s internal logic frustrate its ability to maintain momentum though English-speakers aside, the performances are strong even if the plot developments at times feel unoriginal. Even so the film sells its message of family reunion and perhaps less palatably patriarchal social conventions as Lin Hao steps up to protect his daughter and community from the threats that surround them be they giant crocodiles or otherwise.

Crocodile Island is out now in the US on Digital & DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

US release trailer (English trailer)

Hidden Blade (无名, Cheng Er, 2023)

Posted on by

In a moment of calm in Chang Er’s Hidden Blade (无名, Wúmíng), a man is served drunken shrimp and watches the poor creatures flail as they’re cooked alive in a bloody soup before placing them in his mouth still kicking, the red liquid dripping from his lips. The heroes are to some extent much the same, plunged into the dangerous waters of the Sino-Japanese war and drowning among its myriad confusions no longer even certain of their own identity let alone that of others. 

It’s at this that the Chinese title, Anonymous, hints for in this world of constant duplicity names are rarely exchanged or on occasion given only posthumously. That is aside from Mr. He (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who introduces himself promptly after giving a secret knock to enter a hotel room marked with a Japanese character to meet a Mr. Liang who, it seems, intends to betray the Communist cause and instead serve the Wang Jingwei Regime which has sided with Japan in the puppet state of Manchuria, though we can in no way be sure if either of these men are telling the full truth or are who they claim to be. 

Chang replays this scene later with additional content as he will with several scenes throughout the film adding new context as he goes. Like Lou Ye’s Purple Buttlerfly, the fractured narrative hints at the chaos of an age in which nothing is quite as it seems and the truth is always obscured if at times irrelevant. Spanning the second Sino-Japanese war and its immediate aftermath, the film suggests that the motivations underpinning Japanese imperialism are anti-Communist and that Manchuria is a key asset for them as a bulwark against Soviet incursion. Collaborating with the Japanese, the Wang Jingwei Regime is the third point in a triangle lodged between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communist Party with the implication that it essentially needs to drop out lowering the barriers for a confrontation between the two and the eventual victory of the Communists which occurs three years after the end of the film in 1949.

Technically the third part in the “China Victory Trilogy” which was conceived as “a gift to the Communist Party for its centenary” the film may make some bold claims as to the role of Communist spies in the 1930s but nevertheless neatly aligns the covert resistance movement with the Party’s eventual triumph if subversively ending on a note of loss and melancholy which leaves the survivors in lonely exile, ideologically victorious but emotionally ruined. Both Liang and the ambivalent Japanese soldier Watanabe (Hiroyuki Mori) talk of wanting a quiet life retiring to ancestral land as ordinary farmers freed from the murky world of politics but are each frustrated while He and Watanabe’s young goon Ye (Wang Yibo) wrestle with the romantic costs of their political choices. Yet the most dignified performance is reserved for an impossibly beautiful KMT assassin caught before she was able to take out a government minister while posing as his mistress “He used to write poems, now he writes execution orders,” Watanabe laments of the Minister (Da Peng) who later it seems pays a heavy price for his ruthless opportunism. At least his would-be-assassin remained true to her ideals and accepted her fate with dignity. Indeed, she may be the only one who is certain of herself and her identity even in her impeccable elegance which is a something of a mixed message given her political affiliation. 

In the end, it may be the self-denial that slowly erodes their souls while forced to conceal their true intentions even to those close to them. Then again, it’s impossible to know what’s for real and what’s for show. An intensely emotional exchange could in fact be intended for someone else’s ears or merely a cruel tragedy of misrepresentation. The real hidden blade is the self-repression living in an atmosphere of oppressive suspicion requires rather than the communist sleeper agents who in this version of the tale beat the Japanese into retreat. Featuring top notch production design and costuming, Chang’s oscillating venture through an abyss of cruelty and betrayal finds its heroes victorious but no so much anonymous as robbed of both name and country, lonely exiles of a war not quite won. 

Hidden Blade is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (dialogue free)

Creepy Crawly (๑๐๐ ร้อยขา, Pakphum Wongjinda & Chalit Krileadmongkon, 2022)

Posted on by

While everyone’s busy thinking about a high profile threat of infection, an unexpected aggressor raises its ugly head in Pakphum Wongjinda and Chalit Krileadmongkon’s insectile horror Creepy Crawly (๑๐๐ ร้อยขา). Centipedes in themselves are little creepy given the undulating motion of their many legs and tendency to crawl out from places where you’d least expect them, but this particular bug seems to have undergone a mammoth evolution to become a bloodsucking parasite capable of threatening the human race!

The film opens with a naive vlogger getting lost in the Thai countryside and deciding to pitch a tent in the middle of nowhere while unable to locate her campsite despite having encountered an elderly person bleeding profusely from the mouth whom she does nothing to help. During the night she’s bothered by giant centipedes and then has some kind of altercation with the elderly person. Some months later, an emergency order has been placed on the country due to the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. Another YouTuber, Fame, who is well known for uploading videos criticising hotel accommodation, arrives at a hotel which has been turned into a quarantine facility along with her brother, Fiew, and a family of three, adult Taekwondo champion Leo, his naive sister Lena, and their father who is deaf. 

Obviously, the centipede, which is later described as a Tablongplum which can possess a human body and feast on its blood, has somehow made its way to the hotel and is particularly interested in Fame because she suffers from a rare disease which means that her blood would enable the Tablongplum to live a very long life. However, the bugs aren’t the only threat in the hotel even if they’re first discovered by the only remaining maid, Pond, feasting on a dead rat in a vacant room. The sleazy manager, Wit, is paranoid about the fortunes of his hotel during the pandemic considering it has already been dealt a reputational blow after being identified as the source of a covid cluster. It’s implied that he’s only got permission to re-open as a quarantine facility thanks to a dodgy deal with an important person who has also turned up, ironically belittling Wit for wearing a mask while describing covid as a “just a cold”, for a completely free and very discreet overnight stay with his mistress. 

Those are just a few of the reasons that Wit refuses to listen when Fame and Leo discover a body at the end of a blood trail, accusing them of being in cahoots doing a bit for the YouTube channel to further discredit his hotel which even on the surface of things seems not to be particularly well run. With the hotel technically in lockdown and patrolled by an armed guard, the tension begins to increase once it’s realised that the Tablongplum can possess and take on the form of any of the guests meaning no one can trusted and the bug could be anywhere. Somewhat improbably, not only is it able to fully understand human language even independent of its human hosts but also seems to have some knowledge of culture and is aware of how various things work rather than just being a giant blood sucking parasite apparently able to control vast armies of much smaller but admittedly nasty bugs especially when they appear in large numbers. 

The solution seems to be “kill it with fire”, though just the pandemic the bugs prove hard to stamp out with the infection seemingly continuing even after the big bad is supposedly eliminated as the centipedes continue to dominate human society. The film seems to be making a minor point about silly YouTubers who endanger themselves or thoughtlessly ruin the lives of others for clicks while also laying the blame on sleazy managers like Wit along with the political corruption that enables a health hazard to continue long after it should. Meanwhile, tiny bugs eat away at the surface, undermining the foundations as they go. Seeing an entire hotel covered in horrible insects is undoubtedly creepy though perhaps there was something rotten there all along. In any case, it seems there’s no escape from nature’s revenge or its bloodsucking tendrils. 

Creepy Crawly is released in the US on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on Oct. 3 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Gangnam Zombie (강남좀비, Lee Soo-sung, 2023)

Posted on by

A struggling YouTuber takes on sexism, classism and the zombie apocalypse in Lee Soo-sung’s office-bound horror Gangnam Zombie (강남좀비). Lee apparently chose the title to appeal to international audiences hoping to cash in on the cachet of Gangnam Style and the film does have a made for export aesthetic, but even so it tackles some of the ills of contemporary Korea from work-based sexual harassment to the difficulties of getting a foot in the door in media and calls from your mother asking you to go home and farm melons with her rather than hang around failing to make it Seoul. 

For all that, however, Hyun-seok (Ji Il-joo) is a fairly cheerful man actually quite excited about asking his colleague Min-jeong (Park Ji-yeon ) out to a Christmas concert even if voices on the radio warn that we’re not so much living in a post-pandemic world as with a virus that could easily mutate again and there’s no telling when the next great pathogen may arise to kill us all off for good. This is essentially what the film suggests the zombie virus is, though the implication that it was shipped in from China may be in fairly poor taste along with the immediate allusion to the first cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2019. In any case, patient zero acquires the virus from a zombie cat apparently trapped inside a container vessel he was in the middle of robbing and then goes on to kill his accomplice. 

Meanwhile the film devotes much of its time to the travails of Hyun-seok who is accosted by the landlady of the building where his office is because his boss is way behind on their rent while Hyun-seok counters he hasn’t been paid for three months either. The boss is also sexually harassing Min-jeong but she feels she can’t say anything because it was difficult for her to get this job and she’s worried about being blacklisted if people find out she reported her harassment. Hyun-seok had run into her outside work standing up for two women against to two chauvinistic men who’d apparently tried to use a date rape drug on one only her friend had noticed and saved her. Min-jeong feels confident standing up to them, citing the law to prove her point, but has mixed feelings when Hyun-seok intervenes pointing out that if they get lawyers it could be him going to jail not them. 

But then again, the law’s not much use in a zombie apocalypse. Hyun-seok is also a reserve member of the national Taekwondo team which is certainly a handy skill to have, but it’s also true that he sometimes ironically falls into a sexist hero mode in his desire to protect Min-jeong even if he does teach her a few moves she can use against both zombies and sleazy bosses allowing her to hold her own and in fact save him on more than one occasion. Meanwhile they are both saddled with the snooty landlady who is forever complaining that “the poor” have no manners, sense of responsibility, or inclination to save up for things while insisting no one call the police because it’ll lower the property prices and she’s trying to sell the building. It might be tempting to see her as an embodiment of a rabidly capitalist society consuming its workers and turning them into mindless, flesh-hungry drones if it weren’t perhaps also true that the film is not all that sympathetic about Hyun-seok’s failure to make it as a YouTuber. Perhaps he ought to listen to his mother and go home to farm melons after all. 

Lee does his best with a limited budget, as Hyun-seok and Min-jeong desperately try to escape the corporate prison of the office building to seek freedom and safety outside but largely saves the zombie action for the climactic final sequences in returning to the film’s opening while otherwise focussing on Hyun-seok’s romantic diffidence and the problematic atmosphere in his moribund live-streaming office. But then again it seems to say that just because you got away once doesn’t mean you’re safe or the aggressors of a dog eat dog society won’t necessarily wake back up when you least expect it to embody the city once again consuming those who cannot escape it with increasingly bloody violence. 

Gangnam Zombie is released in the US on Digital, DVD, and blu-ray on Sept. 26 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Childe (귀공자, Park Hoon-jung, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

Posted on by

“Isn’t money great? Everything is solvable with it” according to a lawyer working for an ailing chaebol CEO, but for the man he’s talking to money is at the root of all his problems because he doesn’t have any and is therefore powerless not least to save his equally ailing mother who needs an expensive operation to survive. The latest action drama from Park Hoon-jung, The Childe (귀공자, Gwigongja) implies an apparent focus switch in that the korean title, Nobleman, is also that of its absurdly cheerful assassin. “Childe” in its medieval spelling may simply be an attempt to lend a eerie mythical quality similar to the way the word “witch” is used in Park’s previous films, but in its original meaning also hints at the ostensible protagonist’s liminal status as a “nobleman” who has not yet come of age. 

That’s in part because Marco (Kang Tae-joo) has no idea of his parentage, only that his father was Korean and returned home alone leaving him and his mother behind in the Philippines. Referred to by a derogatory term for children fathered by Korean men as a result of sex tourism, Marco is an embittered young man filled with resentment and little hope for the future whose literal fatherlessness is an allusion to his cultural orphanhood. His mother sent him to Korean schools and raised him only to speak English and Korean, either feeling some affection for his absent father or more practically deciding he might have a better life as a Korean even if in the end neither culture fully accepts him. He would never have attempted to look for his father were it not for his mother’s illness hoping in some way to make him accept responsibility for his actions and the family he abandoned. 

In essence, Park uses the ailing chaebol patriarch’s familial irresponsibility as a wider metaphor for corporatising colonialism and exploitation while emphasising the corrupting influence of chaebol culture in which money really can solve pretty much everything even, it’s implied, imminent death. Picked up by a slick lawyer, Marco is told his father is looking for him too because, ironically enough, he is also ill and near death so simply wants to see the son he abandoned. Chairman Han will fly him to Korea and also cover his mother’s medical bills if he agrees to come but once he arrives Marco realises he’s in a very precarious position caught in the middle of a succession battle between his two half-siblings who each see him only as a pawn and ultimately want him dead. A mysterious assassin billed as The Nobleman (Kim Seon-ho) but introducing himself only as a “friend”, possibly the last you’ll ever make, is hot on his tail though his motivations remain unclear. 

As in some of his other films, Park hints at a mysterious shadow world filled with conspiracy and dominated by chaebol interests though in this case the figure of the corrupted patriarch takes on a poignant sensibility in which he too has become little more than a pawn. It appears he may disapprove of his children’s actions and actually has a genuine interest in meeting the son he abandoned who is like the hero of a fairytale the most just, deprived of his birthright by the greedy machinations of others. The abiding mystery may be why the chairman is kept alive though it seems that oldest son Yi-sa (Kim Kang-woo) is otherwise unable to maintain control of the corporate empire without recourse to his father’s identity for he has little power of his own. 

That might go some way to explaining the absurdity of his sociopathic violence, wandering around in a bathrobe carrying a shot gun and executing newspaper editors who’ve tried to expose their dodgy dealings in the midst of a vast estate bordered by forests. Even the school girl half-sister roams around with a pistol taking pot shots at Marco and The Nobleman but interestingly not at Yi-sa or the Chairman which hints at an odd kind of familial solidarity even in this incredibly dysfunctional and corrupt environment along with a wilful determination to deprive Marco of what may be his birthright. As with his previous films, Park loads up on gore delivered with more than a little absurdity in a series of high impact action scenes, but finally returns again to an unconventional friendship and unexpected brotherhood between the powerless and dispossessed in a sense at least reclaiming something that was theirs by right with the only means at their disposal. 

The Childe screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival and is released in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)