Opinions of a Wolf

Summary:
In the city of Seoul a haughty American military officer makes a Korean worker pour formaldehyde down the drain, which empties into the River Han.  Shortly a creature mutates and turns into a beast that comes up out of the river and terrorizes the peaceful people living and working beside the river.  The government cracks down on everyone who came into contact with the beast, claiming that the mutation is contagious.  Meanwhile, the beast captures a little girl, and her whole family escapes quarantine and goes in pursuit of her.

Review:
I’ve developed a fondness for foreign movies, but this one was epically confusing.  In fact, I live tweeted it, and my tweets were mostly ones of confusion.  I’m really not sure how this movie crossed over abroad the way it did.  Think of the worst American horror movie you’ve seen in the last couple of years and think about someone bothering to translate it into Korean.  That’s what watching this was like.

First, there’s the main issue of formaldehyde turning only one creature in the whole River Han into a beast.  That doesn’t make any sense at all.  Period.  Then there’s the beast itself.  Although the cgi is very good, how it just doesn’t look particularly frightening.  It can run around on land, swim, and hang by its tail off the bridges.  It frankly looks a lot like a giant fetus running around.  I couldn’t stop laughing.

Then there were just a bunch of odd, confusing moments.  Maybe it was a cultural thing?  Maybe the translation was bad?  I’m really not sure.  For instance, when the beast first appears, someone calls out that it’s a dolphin and gets all excited.  I’m sorry; it looks nothing like a dolphin at any point in time.  Wtf?  Then there’s the main family.  For the longest time, I thought that the little girl and her father were actually brother and sister with a slightly incestuous relationship.  They look practically the same age!  He gives her beer because she’s “in middle school now.”  In fact, the whole family’s relationships with one another were completely baffling.  Then there’s one of the weapons used against the beast that was some sort of inflated thing hanging down from a beam or something, and it, swear to god, just looked like a giant, yellow penis.  Wtf?  There were just too many wtf moments to get into the movie.

The one good thing I can say about the movie is that it reveals quite clearly the anti-American feelings in South Korea.  I’m sure it would be interesting as a cultural study for that alone.  I guess it was also entertaining, ableit in a wtf way.  Given that, I’d recommend it to people with an interest in Korean culture or an enjoyment of bad horror movies.

2 out of 5 stars

Source: Netflix

Buy It