Project: Wolf Hunting (Neugdaesanyang)

 There's a scene early on in Project: Wolf Hunting where a suicide bomber detonates in a Philippine airport - he's not a terrorist, he's trying to get at one of the many criminals being deported to Korea that day. By setting off a bomb in a crowd. Ahem. Anyhow, in the aftermath the camera lingers lovingly on the carnage - debris, a pair of broken glasses, a severed arm, arrayed tastefully on the sidewalk. And then comes the blood, running like someone's given up on cleaning the mess and decided it would be better to spill a bucket of red paint on everything and call it a day.

 It's pretty much a promise. At this point I'm legally bound (I think) to quote the director (Hongsun Kim) and say that 2.5 tons of fake blood were used in this movie. That's basically a full rhinoceros and a bit put in a blender. 

 But before the film once again indulges its wild side, there's almost half an hour of a surprisingly restrained, pretty compelling non-violent thriller.

Red rain is pouring down, pouring down all over me.

 Because of the airport attack, the same criminals that were being extradited to their native Korea from the Philippines in that first scene have to be taken on a cargo ship (The Frontier Titan) departing from a private dock. The boat takes quite a few passengers - about a dozen criminals, the same number of cops, a doctor and his assistant, random workers... enough to allow for a pretty respectable body count later on.

 We get some time getting to know the criminals and the cops as they settle into their rhythms for the next few days. There's a highly professional police lady (Jung So-Min), a police brutality enthusiast captain (Dong Il-Sung, I think?), a rapist punk asshole (Seo In-guk; They even explain he was a teacher for maximum despicability, though I have no idea how he landed that job with grills and full-body yakuza tats), and a ton more. Only a few of them ever get to be proper characters, but the movie does an admirable job of giving a lot of the others a little personality or a fun little line at least.

 As the police and their wards settle down, a few other pieces are moving into place. Some shady outfit's monitoring the ship from a computer-filled control room, the doctor surreptitiously goes down to the hold of the ship to administer sedatives to a heavily mutilated, badass-looking mutant zombie imprisoned in some sort of high tech bed (!) and, more immediately relevant, the guys working the kitchen grab a crate of guns and get the Under Siege party started by shooting up the bridge, take the ship out of the grid, and kick off the second act.

  (I know I'm prone to run-on sentences, but that was bad even by my standards. Anyhow.)

  The prisoners are freed in a ridiculously bloody warden massacre (ridiculously bloody is the catchphrase from now on - gotta use up those 2.5 tons, after all.) And because the ship is so big, a few of the other cops don't even notice the coup! They're on other parts of the boat, investigating, say, why the wireless signal is gone, or a weird axe-waving dude on the bridge.

 It's really well staged, with some good suspense as the threads are pulled taut, and a payoff of a series of high body-count confrontations. The action is great but old-school- it reminded me more of eighties action movies than the long takes and more show-offy moves of modern material, with huge arterial sprays added everywhere for flavor. Complete with the sound of a high-pressure hose going off with each squirt. It's intense, and gory, but not exactly grim... It lacks the medicine-textbook-like elan of modern horror, or its focus on prolonged suffering, and the action-like tone is another excuse, should you need it, to enjoy the mayhem

 A fun time at the movies, in other words. The over-the-top violence also gives the action a very welcome kick whenever it threatens to get a little monotonous.

 Not that that's ever a serious problem, because soon all the bloodshed awakes the monster in the hold, and he proceeds to get in on the action and starts ripping his way through the survivors - cops and criminals alike. Unkillable, super-strong and able to avoid bullets... he's basically a Resident Evil boss monster. 

 The movie's gone from pure, ultraviolent action to some sort of insane action/slasher hybrid. It's grand!

 I'm not going to pretend all the kills are good: There is a lot of punching people into pulp in this movie, and a lot of boring deaths where the monster just grabs people by the neck until blood jets from their faceholes. But there's also a lot of ripping body parts off with bare hands, a bit where someone tears another's arm off and proceeds to bludgeon the newly-minted amputee to death with the wet end. That old standard. Someone's teeth are put to viciously good use. A crowd-pleasing hammer time moment. And so, so much more. 

 And because this is a Korean film, it goes the extra mile and gets ridiculous -well, even more ridiculous- in the home stretch. As if everything going on isn't enough, you get a sci-fi (ish) twist that reminded me a little of The Witch, another very enjoyable Korean movie, but on steroids. After all, it's not every day you get a WW2 flashback that also serves as a device to pump up the body count by a dozen (and against some Unit 731 motherfuckers, no less!)

 

 That final morph in genre allows for some really over-the-top action of the sort the movie hadn't really dipped into up to that moment, right at the point where a saner movie would be winding things down, and it really makes this an essential action/WTF movie. If it wasn't already.