Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

  This one didn't really do a lot for me. It's a pretty standard movie about an obsessed filmmaker (Seo Yea-ji) who's trying to track down an indie horror movie that's rumoured to a) get people who watch it in some sort of trouble and b) to be shot by a gh-gh-gh-ghost!

  This dumps her into an investigative spiral which will, of course, have some pretty dire consequences for her and other people caught up in the quest. It begins rather well (if a bit uninspired), but not a lot of time goes by before she's doing a few questionable and/or deeply stupid things to track down the film. Since she doesn't really have a strong motivation to do those things (beyond "I'm under pressure to do my own horror movie", which really doesn't cut it) or a proper justification for her obsession, it's hard to sympathise with her when the inevitable spooks come a-knocking.

 The cast is good, the cinematography (by Young-soo Yoon) is good, and Director Kim Jin-won clearly has chops - his film has some good ambiance and a couple of decently creepy moments - but as a whole neither the story (also by Jin-won) nor the horror coalesce into something substantial or even particularly interesting. Oh well.

Exhuma (Pamyo)

 When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.

 Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).

 It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.

 Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang  Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.

 The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.

Ninja Terminator

 Godfrey Ho's name is synonymous with legendary terrible movies. The guy was so prolific, and his output so truly awful that his name is one of the few I remember from my martial-arts watching era as a kid; I didn't recognize Chang Cheh by name then, nor Ching Siu-Tung - but whenever uncle Godfrey's name popped up at the beginning of a movie, there would be a collective groan.

 The insanely prolific writer/director/producer started his career at the Shaw Brothers, but he soon branched out and formed a company with the like-minded Joseph Lai called IFD. There their MO would be to cheaply get the rights for some random Asian movie, cut it into pieces and shoot some supplementary footage with a stable of slumming western actors*; They'd then splice everything and re-dub it into a poorly stitched hybrid of old and new material which they call some random combination of buzzwords in a bid to win over the western markets. And hey, it worked; I rented several of their movies back in the 90s.

 Ninja Terminator follows this process to the letter. The 1984 South Korean film The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry would provide the source material, and Ho would then append additional footage of grown men skulking around in pijamas. The result is an astoundingly bizarre fever dream, a perfect storm of incompetence and chutzpah. If the concept of 'so bad it's... still bad, but also funny as hell' appeals to you at all, this is essential viewing.

 Just how bad is it? Well, to be perfectly honest the Korean half of the equation is not bad at all. Cheesy as all hell, and probably pretty dumb even before Ho imposed his "vision" upon it, but it looks like it was a decently fun action flick. It stars Jaguar Wong (Jack Lang), a cocky, assholish cop who goes up against a crime syndicate led by a heroin dealer in a beyond ridiculous He-Man wig (Hwang Jang-lee).

 The plot has been completely rewritten and re-cut to incorporate Ho's ninja shenanigans, but the fights are both frequent and very good, with fairly complex choreographies that succeed in giving Jaguar a recognizable personality. They don't quite stack up with what folks were doing over at Hong Kong in that same time frame, but it's a honorable effort, and Lang has a great screen presence even if his character is an unlikeable dick.

 So half of the movie is a perfectly enjoyable martial arts police actioner. And then there's Ho's contribution: an incompetent, obviously tacked-on ninja yarn that frequently had me in stitches.

 The 'story' concerns an evil ninja empire that has finally reunited the three parts of a statuette that grants invulnerability. Concerned that it will be used for evil, three of the ninjas (Richard Harrison, Jonathan Watts and a third one that I think is never shown) defect and steal parts of the statue.

 The evil ninja master sends a red ninja (the ubiquitous Phillip Ko) to try and retrieve the statue pieces. He kills off the anonymous third ninja, and in response one of the good ninjas - named, I shit you not, Ninja Master Harry - calls Jaguar Wong from the other movie to get him to protect his dead comrade's sister.

 To give him a bit more gravitas, all of Ninja Master Harry's calls are placed from a Garfield phone. This... fucking... movie.

 So there's your link; In the Ninja Terminator version, Jaguar Wong is not a cop trying to stop a heroin smuggling syndicate while trying to protect an old flame, he's doing the bidding of a secretive cabal of ninjas who spend their free time bowing down to a chintzy cheap prop like an otaku venerating a bust of his favorite anime waifu.

 All the Ninja hijinks are categorized by wall-to-wall incompetence, terrible acting, stilted action, gratuitous cartwheeling, incoherent plotting and all sorts of ludicrous, hilarious touches. Here's a short, non-comprehensive list to give you a taste of the sort of batshit craziness you can expect:

- Ninja Master Harry's wife gets attacked by crabs while trying to cook them; His husband protects her by throwing a kunai at one of them. Cue a shot of a poor crab walking around with a blade stuck in its back. In case the animal cruelty doesn't provide enough drama, this scene has multiple dramatic zooms.

- Ninja Master Harry demonstrates his prowess with a katana by slicing a watermelon. It's such a thrilling sequence that another ninja master repeats it later on.

- The Evil Ninja Empire delivers ultimatums by VHS tapes borne by... a tiny, dime-store wind up robot toy. The robot (like the Garfield phone) has a surprising amount of screen time.

- Here's a short image sequence of a ninja master receiving an ultimatum from the bad guys. Imagine it set to the most overblown music possible, complete with sci-fi bleep bloop robot sounds:

 And there is so much more. Right up to a hilarious final shot, Ninja Terminator is a gold mine for this sort of shit. I have no idea if anyone involved possessed any self-awareness whatsoever; Is the Garfield phone Ninja Master Harry uses to communicate with the other movie a self-consciously ridiculous touch, or did they think that it would go down well with American audiences? I have no idea, and I don't care. Death of the author and all that - bottom line is, it made me laugh. Good on them if they did it on purpose, but given how shoddy this whole endeavour is it's hard to give anyone involved any credit.

 The links between the two movies-within-the-movie are tenuous, but sometimes pretty involved; I have to give Ho credit for that one scene where Ninja Master Harry and his wife watch part of Jaguar's story on a (robot-delivered!) VHS tape. The way Ho's script ties itself into knots to link both stories together just adds to the overwhelming schadenfreude.

 It's so bad it's glorious and if you're in any way inclined to enjoy this sort of shit, it is a fucking delight. The whole thing is available on youtube and, to be honest, given the way Ho exploited his stars and source material, pirating this is probably the best way to watch it. Gather a group of friends, maybe some alcohol and/or chemical assistance, and your night is sorted.

 

 *: This was standard practice for American re-releases of Godzilla and other Japanese movies; Corman's AIP indulged in this sort of thing too.

The Man from Nowhere (Ajeossi)

  Korean cinema was on fire in the first decade of this new millennium, with some of its finest directors putting out films that at least dipped their toes into all sorts of genres - and given the regional characteristic disdain for tonal consistency, often all at once. Park Chan Wook's revenge trilogy is probably the best of these, but consider Kim Jee-woon putting out Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good The Bad the Weird and I Saw the Devil back-to-back. That's a run of almost Carpenterian proportions! Bong Joon Ho announced himself with Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother. And there were many others.
 Imagine following up on any of these.

 Writer/director Lee Jeong-beom did just that to great local box-office success with Ajeossi - a polite word for men older than yourself normally used by children when they don't know who they're speaking with (thank you google!). The film is Known as The Man from Nowhere in other territories, because Mister! doesn't sound half as badass.
 To describe it glibly, it's a film that sits squarely between Man on Fire and Taken. Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) is a quiet, moody, ridiculously good-looking pawn shop owner who's taken in a stray: So-mi (Kim Sae-ron), the young daughter of a prostitute neighbour. The tiny, big-eyed girl often comes to stay over at Tae-sik's place whenever her mom is either with clients or indulging in substances.

 That drug habit proves to be deadly for So-mi's mom after she steals two bags of heroin from a Chinese-affiliated gang whose activities imply an attempt to win some sort of heinous activity bingo: drug-smuggling, illegal organ harvesting, human trafficking... I didn't notice any prostitution, but that's a blessing given that they enslave and traffic small children. And harvest their organs once they're all used up.
 So it's this group of deeply hateable villains that soon traces the robbery back to So-mi's mother, and kidnap the both of them. Tae-sik becomes involved because his pawn shop was (without his knowledge) used to stash the stolen merchandise. That makes him a target - but, and hear me out here, I know this might come as a shock - he's not so helpless; he is possessed of a very particular set of skills, etc. etc. That showdown leaves one man dead, shot to death by his own partner in cold blood once incapacitated by Tae-sik.

 The best part: The criminal who shot the downed man, a Vietnamese hitman (played by Thai actor Thanayong Wongtrakul) later observes: "He didn't even flinch at the shots". That's some quality storytelling there.

 These events send Tae-sik on a single-minded quest to rescue the missing woman and what becomes increasingly clear is his surrogate daughter. At first he lets himself be coerced into doing favours for the kidnappers (which sets him in the sights of the police detectives who are dead-set on catching the gang), and later, when it becomes clear there's no dealing with these people, he resorts to good old detective work and sweet, sweet violence.

 The Man from Nowhere may be derivative but it's executed almost perfectly and with enough colour to render it much, much better than both of the American movies it closely resembles. It sprawls out to follow two sets of gangsters and the policemen trying to catch them for a while, and it even goes into Tae-sik's backstory a little - but none of this ever feels unnecessary because these scenes include, say, a cop fly-kicking a guy in a wheelchair with enough force to send him rolling backwards a few meters into a pillar. If that's bloat, it's a kind of bloat I can fully endorse.

 Elsewhere, the tone is remarkably controlled. The action and melodrama are heightened, but it doesn't register that much thanks to an overriding grimness; This is a gritty, mean-spirited action film where the humour is deployed judiciously, and often in editing choices (we often jump from the moment where shit is about to go down directly to its aftermath, only for the film to loop back in later).  More importantly, the action scenes are excellent and varied, combining gunfights and melee with a sprinkling of excellent car crashes. I particularly liked a final brawl where our hero gets particularly brutal to intimidate a small horde of thugs to keep the number of enemies on him manageable.

 I thought Won Bin was excellent as the protagonist - a good combination of John-Wick-awesome with a little more vulnerability than you'd expect out of something like this. I'm biased, though, because when I originally watched this I had already seen Mother. The guy hasn't acted in anything else in the intervening decade and a half, which is a huge shame; Dude had chops, looks and range.
 His character here is a perfect little pretty boy who goes into his action sets dressed in immaculate suits, and at one point gives himself a perfect haircut; It does contrast a little with the grittiness of the rest of the film.

 There are a couple of good villains, too - the Vietnamese hitman shows off some honour and a bit of soul and is well used throughout; There's also a crazy, whiny psycho (Kim Sung-oh) who's very enjoyably over the top - it's all a little cheesy, but they both set up hugely satisfying story beats and scenes.

 The action shoots for (and achieves) immediacy and intensity but it's mostly very clear even when it dips into first-person shots, there are some excellent stunts (including an impressive jump off a tall window done with no body doubles). The director is ably assisted by cinematographer Lee Tae-yoon and a score by Shim Hyun-jung to give his film some excellent ambiance. There are many better Korean movies out there, but few pure action ones.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

 A horror streaming channel enlists a bunch of randos and a couple of internet personalities to go explore one of the (real-life) "7 freakiest places on the planet", according to CNN: Gonjiam Asylum, an abandoned mental hospital with a murky spooky history that the film, sadly, seems completely uninterested in exploring.

 Maybe you have a higher tolerance for influencers; In my case, I couldn't wait for most of these thinly drawn asshats to start getting killed in gruesome ways. Sadly, we get to spend a lot of 'quality' time with them before anyone comes even close to dying - first as the 'captain' (Wi Ha-Joon) lays out the plans for the stream and the crew make their way to their destination, then as they start exploring the hospital while their intrepid leader watches from a tent and edits and adds music to the stream in real time.

 And we get to be very close to them, too, thanks to the camera rig with which they're outfitted: one go-pro to see everything they're seeing... and another one pointed straight at their face to catch their every reaction. So when things finally get moving and everyone starts getting chased by the asylum haunts, we get all the screaming via close-up (think Iron Man's in-helmet cam). At least that part seems to be faithful to a actual horror streams. On the other hand, I could have done without it.

 Beyond being young, pretty and vacuous, there's not a lot going on with the cast. The script barely slows down to give the characters space - and to be honest, when it does, like one of the guys' constant negging of the girl with the weakest personality - it distanced me even more from them.

 The asylum itself fares a little bit better. There's no rhyme nor reason to the haunting, no coherence to the spooky shit - just an assemblage of random weird imagery and fairly well-trod scares, but there's a decent sense of buildup, and urban exploration of dark, derelict spaces is never going to fail completely at being creepy. And things do get admirably hectic once the film decides to stop wasting our time and throws everything it can think of at the screen in an attempt to scare the audience.

 The spooky business is varied and well staged, with a good combination of jump-scares and more slow-burning atmospheric groundwork. Some good imagery, too, though most of it feels fairly random. Not that all of it works; Spooky changing grafitti will never not be stupid, and one of the film's centerpiece scares - its own take on Evil Dead's possessed deadites - is so goofy-looking it made me laugh every time it appeared.

 Visually... it's a found footage film, so don't expect anything on that front. A couple of scenes are captured with extremely wide angle cameras, which at least adds some flair to the fumbling-in-the-dark scenes. Other than that, it (by design) combines the ugliness of found footage films and youtube reaction videos. No blood, no gore, which is kind of admirable in a film of this type (and kind of reinforces my impression that it's at least partly aimed at a teen audience.)

 It's a movie that clearly has one mandate - to scare the living shit out its target audience. The way it goes about it is a little too blatant, derivative and incoherent for it to be successful for me (never mind that I'm decades out of being in said target audience); But it definitely gets an A for effort.

Marui Video

 A marui video is, according to... well, the movie Marui Video, a term prosecutors in Korea use for evidence media that, because it's too violent or disturbing, is not released to the public.

 A documentarian and a reporter (Seo Hyun-woo and Jo-Min-Kyoung, I think - information on this one is a bit thin on the ground if you don't know Korean) get wind of a 'cursed' video depicting the 1992 murder of a woman by her boyfriend in an inn room in Busan. It's a marui because it captures the killing, but it's cursed because at one point you can clearly see the face of a kid looking out from one of the mirrors in the room.

 They set out, along with a small crew, to try and track down the tape. What we're watching here is not the documentary these people made - it's one put together by a company called Marui LLC, based on original crew's collected footage, which was found in an abandoned van outside a shrine in 2019 and has just now released to the public due to a legal dispute. Got that? I guess it then technically doesn't count as marui, even though it includes footage from an actual marui video.

 Most of the film is actually comprised of a pretty compelling investigation - first a quest for the videotape itself, and then a delve into some ancillary details surrounding the murder. Particularly, the crew starts looking into the shady owner of the inn - a man who also owned another property where a kid brutally killed his mother and sister and then set himself on fire. The boy, incidentally, looks exactly like the figure in the mirror in the video.

 Writer/director Yoon Joon-Hyeong does a good job making sure both the mundane and supernatural elements of the film's intertwined mysteries link up in satisfying ways, and things mostly end up making sense. Which is good, because this is a slow, dry movie. There are a few flourishes - one of the funnier ones is a recurring genealogical tree that keeps getting edited, and thanks to the documentary gimmick, the film is slickly edited and usually has a number of angles to choose from in any given scene.

 It's good at the creepy stuff, too. The shadow of Noroi looms large, of course, but I think the contained and more straightforward thrust of the plot here is enough to differentiate it. The nature of the curse here is a little less J-horror-inspired, even if it includes several nods to the subgenre (my favorite - whenever the 'curse' manifests, it fills the ceiling with black mould that looks like the burn stains where the kid immolated himself).
 There's a standout Korean exorcism sequence and a few derelict house exploration scenes that are pretty effective. They balance out with the sadly prevalent 'running through the woods in the dark' finale, at least, and some staggeringly bone-headed decision-making on the part of our protagonists - which is a shame, because they're a likeable lot otherwise. Like on virtually all these movies, the filmmaking is only preoccupied with immediacy and immersion, with everything else a tertiary concern at best. It scores some good ambiance, but other than that it tends to look like ass.

 The unique mystery at the center and the (slow) way it's drawn out are probably the main draws here - the horror is a bit more hit and miss. I'm glad I watched it, but if you don't enjoy this particular genre I wouldn't recommend it.

Spiritwalker (Yucheitalja)

 Kang I-an (Yoon Kye-sang) wakes up in a car crash, his memory gone; Whenever he looks in any reflective surface (and there are a lot of them at hand in this movie), he sees another man's face. It's unclear how, but it seems he knows he's not in his own body, something that's driven violently home when a few hours later reality shifts around him and he finds himself in the body of a completely different man.

 Every twelve hours, like clockwork. he's dropped in the shoes of a someone from within a group of what ends up being a bunch of really shady people. Making things more complicated, the people he inhabited are still walking around, the twelve hours he spent in their body completely forgotten.

 Kang I-an (Ian? Ian!) enlists the help of a (pretty unfunny) homeless comedy sidekick to try and figure out what's happening, and finds that everyone he's been possessing is part of some ill-defined conspiracy. What's more, they're somehow related to the fate of a certain badass lady (Lim Ji-yeon) he feels compelled to seek out and protect.

 Ian Spiritwalker's situation is immediately engaging, but it loses a lot of steam very quickly: unwieldy dialog, a confusing throughline, and a rotating cast of poorly defined characters to act as the protagonist often threaten to do the movie in. The prosaic, boring conspiracy at the heart of the movie and a hilariously terrible explanation for Ian's superpower don't exactly redeem things either.

 It's that slickness, along with a relatively fleet pace and some pretty good action, that ultimately make the movie a success. Director Yoon Jae-geun can't quite hammer his script into a good narrative, but it's expertly seasoned with car chases, close-quarter scraps and firefights (which end up becoming a close-quarter firefight for the obligatory John Wick-influenced finale). There's not nearly as many action sequences as I would have liked, but they're all a lot of fun and full of neat stunts which the sometimes over-busy camerawork captures well. I also appreciated how analog a lot of it is (not always a given with modern Korean cinema), especially an excellent car chase and some very chunky explosive work to mark bullet impacts.

 It's a little too slick for its own good - a fun time, but not particularly memorable. The acting is fine, and I imagine everyone involved relished the challenge of differentiating their normal personas from those times they're being puppeteered by Ian. You can definitely tell who was good with the martial arts and who wasn't based on the editing style used for their fight scenes (which are a little too reliant on quick cuts even at their best).

 The only distinct character besides the mystery woman and comedy indigent is (I think) Yoo Seung-mok, playing a coked-out corrupt cop who's channeling the same over-the-top villainy as Gary Oldman in The Professional. Elsewhere, a betrayal from a supposedly major character treated by the movie as a momentous event barely even registers, which is oddly emblematic of the film's problems.

Alienoid: Return to the Future (Oegye+in 2bu)

 I was actually looking forward to the sequel/conclusion/second half of Alienoid, a Korean action movie that uncomfortably mashed together a wuxia epic and chintzy sci-fi spectacle - each half set in separate timelines, cobbled together with a mess of haphazardly plotted time travel and a very poorly thought-out alien conspiracy.

 While the modern sci-fi section was terrible, the wuxia storyline was surprisingly excellent; And by the end it seemed that, with most of the main characters stranded in the past, that would force the sequel to play to its strengths.

 And for all of maybe half an hour, it seems like it's working. The first few scenes follow the mysterious gun-toting woman - who we now know is Lee Ahn (Kim Tae-ri), the kid from the first movie, all grown up (to add to the confusion, there are two timelines set in the past, ten years apart).

 She now possesses a MacGuffin which will allow the evil aliens to return to the future to enact their cataclysmic terraforming plans, so all the bad guys are going after her. Trying to (mostly) help her are Dosa Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his two cat/human hybrid servants and two other magicians played by Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin.

 That's a very decent setup! All of these characters are fun, and the first fight - against some mercenaries - is a lot of fun, a very traditional Chinese-style fight where Lee Ahn doesn't let her opponent unsheathe his sword. The way it's shot is not great, but the choreography is. The action/stunt director is Sungchul Ryu, returning from the first movie. There's some good wire work later on.

 What follows - which focuses on the sorcerers chasing Lee Ahn - is admittedly not as good, but it's all mostly fun. And then... it all goes to shit.

 First we, uh, return to the future to reunite with Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee). She was an extremely minor character in the first movie, the custodian of Lee Ahn's BFF whose main thing was being 'comically' smitten with Lee Ahn's 'dad'.

 Well, she turns out to be a badass... customs officer, and via an extremely convoluted set of contrivances she finds out about the alien conspiracy. She's also the descendant of a badass warrior monk (Jin Seon-kyu), who was blinded by the aliens when they took over a Dosa monastery.

 By the time we get back to the Wuxia side of things, the plot has spread like an ugly infection, squeezing the fun and joy out of the plot with convoluted revelations about the true nature of several of the protagonists, and more unengaging, effects-based action.

 Once all characters are yanked to the sci-fi timeline it's almost impossible to care about whatever the hell is happening - writer/director Choi Dong-hoon has let all of his worst tendencies subsume everything. All that's left is lousy plotting full of people shrugging off seemingly mortal wounds, terrible jokes, chintzy-looking special effects and deeply unexciting, CGI-dependent action with some occasional posturing. It seems to consciously go for the feel of a Marvel movie.

 It's an ignoble end for something that had a fair amount of potential.

Alienoid (Oegye+in 1bu)

 Aliens - or Alienoids, I guess, but I'm not going to use that word because it's fucking stupid - don't just live among us; They're incarcerated within us.

 In Alienoid's barely sensical cosmology, the human mind is the ultimate alien prison. A warden alien stationed on earth takes receipt of hundreds of prisoners from his home planet every so many years and injects them into our minds. He's also tasked with hunting them down should they take control of their host and try to flee (they can manifest outside the host, carrying the floating human body like a helium balloon; it's a pretty cool/silly image). Earth's atmosphere is poisonous to them, so they can't just ditch us completely - they have to wear us like a suit... or like a (non-)oxygen tank that floats behind them.

 That's just the premise; This is a deeply, deeply convoluted and extremely dumb movie.
 The alien warden (Kim Woo-bin) is also a time traveller, and is accompanied by a wise-cracking floating robot who likes to take on his form - this allows Woo-bin, who plays the warden as a serious, no-nonsense stick in the mud, to also play a 'humorous' sidekick who likes to dress up in goofy suits. The first time he does that the soundtrack goes into full wacky mode. While I'm on that subject - the score for the whole movie is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve things measurably.

 I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.

You'll have to take my word for it, but this scene is almost Woo-level cool.

 Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Half a movie of two halves, as it ends in a cliffhanger pending completion later this year. In any case - half of the story takes place in the modern age, the other half in the late fourteenth century.

 The modern story is honestly pretty shitty: a very kid-friendly FX-heavy adventure that I honestly struggled to muster any interest for, starring the warden, a ten-year old adopted kid sidekick (Choi Yu-ri), and the comedy robot. It's mostly about the kid figuring out what's going on with her 'dad' (which means we get reams of crappy exposition) just as he has to deal with a ship full of rebel alien mutants destroying large chunks of Seoul. The action has its moments but the CGI is very variable, with an unfortunate propensity to have extremely unconvincing humanoids fighting each other. I've had enough of that Marvel shit, thank you very much. I did like the design of the main alien invader.

 The half set in the past, though, is honestly kind of amazing. It's a ridiculously entertaining wuxia-style series of events that follow bounty hunter/bumbling apprentice dosa (the Korean version of a cultivator, as far as I can tell) Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) as he tracks down a mystical dagger. Jun-veol makes for a very likeable doofus, and he has a real knack for physical comedy. Miraculously, the script actually follows through and provides him with some honest-to-god funny material!

 The humor is extremely broad, as usual, but it works more often than not, and the action is very good - not as good as classic wuxia, and it focuses on magic rather than on martial arts (the harry Potter school of kung fu) but it's exciting and very well staged. The scenery and magical mayhem are top-notch - imaginative and full of cool and funny ideas. A lot of Mureuk's wizardry, for example, comes from his painted fan - he pulls out weapons and magic from it, including two cats who shape-shift into sidekicks and accompany him for most of the movie. I love this sort of thing.

 The plot gets a lot less exposition-heavy than the modern-day storyline, too, at least until the closing moments, so of course it's gonna overcomplicate things with weird asides and ridiculous secondary characters, some of them delightful (plus: a little-seen but often-referred to character goes by Dog Turd).

 Even when the main plotline comes to the fore it's more fun, as it allows a love interest / time traveller (Kim Tae-ri, getting a lion's share of cool moments) to pull out a gun in the middle of a brawl in an ancient Korean estate. 

 That's not to say that the main story gets interesting, but at least it doesn't spend all of its time tangling itself into unsatisfying knots. It's an excellent take on modern wuxia, and it more than makes up for the soul-less modern half.
 It's a shame that writer/director Choi Dong-hoon is so enamored of his crappy narrative, as he can tell a hell of a ripping story when he's not preoccupied with conveying the inane particulars of the alien's masterplan.

 The good news is that it seems like the sequel will be led by the more likeable characters; Given how good they, and the mayhem that surrounded them, were here, that's definitely something to look forward to.

The Roundup

 The Roundup chronicles the further adventures of detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok, but I'm going to start calling him by his chosen anglicized moniker of Don Lee) and his merry gang of police brutality enthusiasts, last seen in 2017's very enjoyable The Outlaws. We first get a look at him when he stops a nutjob who's holding a grocery store at knife-point. He gets annoyed at the would-be stabber and actually stabs him lightly in the ass a few times after brutally putting him down. Then, when the newspapers (correctly!) call out undue force, he and his buddies chuckle over the headlines!

 It's... I mean, I think it works within the tone of the movie, which is basically a more comedic, over-the-top Dirty Harry were Clint was a wise-cracking uncle who's not afraid to show some tough love. As with The Outlaws, it operates in a heightened world where torture works, regulations only hinder honest folk who want nothing but to do their job well, and Ma is basically an uncorruptible, infallible engine of justice. I'm ok with it because that's the buy-in to enjoy the film, and I can find it funny. But I'd understand it if others might not... so take this as a trigger warning, there is a lot of  shit in this film that should rightly horrify any right-thinking person.

 With all that out of the way: it's another fun outing for Don Lee and the gang. This time around they're sent out to Viet-Nam to extradite a Korean criminal; Detective Seok Do and his chief (Choi Gwi-hwa) are all set to take it as a holiday, but soon they discover that the real reason why their charge has turned himself in is to escape from a nasty psycho (Son Suk-ku) who's targeting Korean tourists abroad. Of course they decide to go out and investigate, even though it's completely out of their jurisdiction, and from there things get a little more complicated as their quarry angers the wrong millionaire and starts getting hunted down by mercenaries.

 I actually like the structure of the movie a lot - the movie starts with a brutal kidnapping, and the rest of the plot grows out of that organically; it's a good script, even if it often gets a little too ridiculous and kind of loses the plot by the final act.

 Don Lee remains the main attraction here, with a lot of cool dad energy (he even delivers a beatdown with his belt!) and comedic chops. It's a pretty funny film, and a lot of it is based on how inappropriate the shit they pull off is. They even sort of repeat the torture scene from the first movie and kind of turn it into a running gag. Bad Detectives: Port of Call Ho Chi Minh, except that the movie is completely, uncritically on their side.
 Most of the cast returns from The Outlaws; all of the cops and even some of the criminals are given supporting roles. The action is also great, a little upgraded from the first one - not just in that Don Lee now delivers some super-powered punches and knocks out someone with a slap, but the main antagonist gets a very respectable one-take knife/machete/cleaver brawl that starts out like the hallway fight in Oldboy but then spreads out into the surrounding house. Lots of cool stunts, people going through lots of furniture, some good vehicular action.

 All in all I think I liked the first one better, even if this is a better case - some of the stuff here just went a little too broad for my taste, especially how much they get away with over in 'Nam. It's also a clear case of a sequel that delivers more of the same, but louder, bigger, and sillier. That's fine, but let's set some higher goals for the third one.

The Outlaws

  "Based on a true story!" Boasts the trailer for The Outlaws, a 2017 Korean film, exclamation sign and everything. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that, like Cocaine Bear, it uses a real incident (an early 2000's police sting which resulted in a bunch of arrests) as a springboard for a pretty nuts police actioner rather than an attempt to shed any light on what actually happened.
 And this is fine! Because as it turns out it's a fun and well-made pretty nuts police actioner.

 Detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok) heads up a small serious crime unit embedded in the Chinatown section of Seoul, trying to curb Chinese gang violence from escalating. The guy has a personal, almost friendly relationship with most of the gang bosses, to the point where he stops a turf war from exploding by browbeating two opposing gang leaders into playing nice with each other.
 He patronizes another gang den, one of those bars/karaoke joints which... yeah, pretty sure it'd count as a serious case of corruption. He and his team also do that thing where they beat up suspects while pointing the office cameras away. Ah, police brutality, always hilarious.

 It works, though, because the movie adopts a pretty heightened tone that doesn't fully break with reality, but it's made abundantly clear that it's not one-hundred percent serious either. They do this mostly by deploying Ma Dong-seok's outsized charisma and impeccable comedic timing; The guy is ridiculously likeable, and can do no wrong even when he fucks up. There's quite a lot of understated humor in the movie, and most of it comes down to Dong-Seok's considerable charm. He's just as likely to treat an armed assailant as a child and annoyedly ask for the weapon, rather than getting into a fight... and the funniest part is that it seems like common sense, yep, that would probably work. At least for Don Lee.

 The main plot arrives in the shape of a trio of mainland goons led by one Jang Chen (ex-K-pop singer Yoon Kye-sang, in good badass form). They come to collect on a debt, and instead take over one of the gangs and start to brutally murder their way across the criminal underworld. They're so ruthless that it actually works! But their methods call too much public attention, and cause the police commissioner to take the case away from the Serious Crimes unit.

 Ma Seok-do takes exception to this, and manages to keep the case for ten more days by betting his job on being able to make 25 arrests before that time is through. Again: not how the world works, but it's a snug fit with the somewhat goofy, ultra-tough tone of the film.

 There's some cheesy business with a surrogate son figure (though he might be his real son, if I understood correctly? That would make it a lot cheesier) and some brutal, actually upsetting violence - torture, sexual violence, that sort of thing. As with much of South Korea's cinematic output, the tone can vary wildly from one scene to the next, but overall it's pretty well considered. There's some bloody detail to some of the carnage but nothing too gory.
 The action is pretty great. There's a lot of it, mostly short and brutal, not show-offy at all. It still manages some fun sequences, my favorite ones involving cars. The standout is the one drawn-out fight set in a public restroom, and it's an absolute winner: no porcelain is cracked, but you can't say the same for mirrors, glass partitions, a flowerpot (!) and some pipes. Great stuff.

 It was hugely successful and has already spawned two wildly popular sequels, with a third one on the way for next year. Based on how enjoyable this one is, I'm really looking forward to catching up with the further adventures of Det. Ma Seok-do and the gang.

The Killer (2022) (Deo killeo: Jugeodo doeneun ai)

  The Killer, or as it's better known, The Killer: A Girl who Deserves to Die (a subtitle that's good for disambiguation and absolutely fuck else) is a 2022 South Korean action movie about a ridiculously proficient professional assassin carving a bloody swathe across the criminal underworld - a JohnWick-alike. A Wicky-likey? A Wick-off.

 Bang Ui-gang (Jang Hyuk) is the titular killer, now enjoying his happily ever after with his wife, Hyeon Soo (Chae-Young Lee). And as is usual in these things, tragedy soon strikes: Hyeon is going on a holiday with a friend, and strong-arms Bang (now that's a name for an assassin!) into taking care of her friend's teenaged daughter for three weeks.
 OK, so maybe that's not in line with family or a puppy getting killed.
 In any case the daughter, Seo-Young Lee (Kim Yun Ji) turns out to be a bit of a brat and annoys Bang to the point where he basically bribes her to get her out of his hair. But on a hunch, he decides to track her down instead... which ends up being a good idea, because a bunch of teen ne'er do wells are basically forcing her into a prostitution ring.

 Bang walks into this induction, cool as a cucumber, kicks everyone's butts, and heads out with Seo. But the next day he finds out that all the kids he'd just knocked around are stabbed to death, and he gets a call from the madam/would-be-pimp that they have a knife with his fingerprints, and that they're going to frame him.
 So Bang tracks them down again, getting more and more violent, and things escalate as they're wont to do in this sort of movie - things of course go deeper than it looked like at first, and poor Seo-Young had been 'chosen' by a rich and powerful douchebag who has half the Korean underworld and part of the Russian Mafia in his back pocket. Because you can't have a Wick-off without the Russian Mafia.

Hallway; Simulated one-take; A horde of thugs; Heavy color grading. Modern action movie bingo!

 South Korean cinema has a long and storied history in the action genre -a film like this is of a line that goes back to The Villainess, The Man from Nowhere (which gets a shoutout here!) and, I dunno, A Bittersweet Life- but it's pretty clear here that the filmmakers were mostly looking westward, and towards the 87North filmography in particular. Which is fine! None of this exist in a vacuum, and it's not like Stahelski and co. didn't lift from other places. Director Jae-Hoon Choi and his fight team keep things lively and memorable; Apparently Bang Ui-Gang is known for doing a lot of the fight choreography, so good on him.
 The action is frequent, varied and a lot of fun - violent, gory (all digital blood, but a little less floaty than most) and filled with pretty cool and painful-looking stunts. I'm a bit less of a fan of the editing, which is too jumpy and tends to change position a bit too often, but things are still crystal clear.

 That's a good thing, because while the script is serviceable, it's one of those jobs where the protagonist is perfect and five steps ahead of everyone else and playing 3D chess while everyone around him is playing tiddlywinks. There are no stakes because he's basically infallible; besides, some of the 3D chess moves are pretty wonky; I have no idea what the hell the use of stringing up a major threat with a weird pulley system achieved, for example, and there's a couple of instances like that seem almost random.

 The script is also hit and miss with characters and their development, but it's not too bad. There's a chunk of maudlin backstory that's pretty cringeworthy, but the character relationships are solid, and there's a welcome amount of (intended) weirdness and funny character moments. Look out for a great scene with a gun dealer and youtube tutorials.

 It's not as solid a movie as the previous collaboration between this director and the protagonist, 2020's excellent historical epic The Swordsman, but it's still a great follow-up- it might be derivative, but it's compelling and full of great action. You could ask for a lot more, but you don't really need it, do you?

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.

Carter (Kateo)

  Carter is a new netflix-produced movie by Jung Byung-gil, his follow up to the awesome Villainess. That movie was made semi-famous for its initial scene, an extended first-person action sequence that followed the protagonist through a bunch of shootouts and hand-to-hand fights and smoothly transitioned to a huge brawl at a gym/dojo. (It's actual lasting claim to glory would actually be a motorcycle chase with katanas that was a referenced on the third John Wick.)

 This new one is what the Villainess would have been if it had put quantity of action at all times over its overall quality. It's an interesting experiment, and honestly, it works for me. Mostly. Almost wholly.
 The entire film is made to look as if it was one continuous shot, but without any pretense that that's what it's actually doing (1917, this ain't) - its trickery is quite transparent; but the camera moves are meticulously planned, constantly in motion and very dynamic (the focus depth changes often, as does even the texture, from GoPro style shots to hyper-clear CGI of varying quality to more professional-looking stuff.) A lot of the film's (clearly insufficient) budget clearly went to support this illusion of seamlessness, which leads to a lot of bad compositing and  pretty piss-poor effects work. So it goes for the action, which very often looks, well, cheap and pretty crappy. Quantity over quantity; why have a couple well realized, realistic looking scenes when you can have them in bulk, and cover most of your running time instead? The movie makes the conscious choice to take the hit and have some truly dire effects now and then, some unsatisfying bad physics to the stunts, some very... videogame-looking mayhem.

 I know this is an old chestnut, but seriously. this one really does look like a video game at times - right down to the transitions from when you're watching a cutscene to when you get to control your character, which I'd never seen replicated in a movie before. So many of the effects are very deep into uncanny valley. So why did I like it? Why would I ever give this a pass when I hated this sort of shit so much in, say, Uncharted, or the vehicle scenes in Train to Busan: Peninsula? (or, to be honest, many of the later Fast and Furious movies).

Kerrrr-Splat!

 For me at least it's energy and enthusiasm. It's like the filmmakers went all out, making these compromises with the full understanding that they would sometimes look like shit, and not caring about it. Or maybe they ran out of money as they began post-production. I'm perfectly fine with the end result, in any case.

 An example: early on during an action beat the camera pans up to the sky, focuses on an extremely shitty looking bird (it looks like someone drew it in with a black sharpie!) It's kinda laughable. But that bird serves as the focus as the scene transitions to a drone shot looking down as a bunch of mooks converge on a building, a literal bird's eye view of the situation. There's a sense of planning, that the movie is busting its ass overtime trying to show you cool shit.

 And there is so much cool shit here. The violence is inventive and gruesome, and often laugh-out-loud audacious; while the camera is rarely still for any amount of time, the blocking is good and it's always clear who is shooting/stabbing/body-slamming whom; it gives the film a lot of momentum, especially as the chases and action scenes fade into each other.

 Yes, there are a couple of times the movie stops dead for an exposition dump, or a couple of truly, truly bad sequences (there's a really terrible free-fall scene that of course Netflix shows as a preview of the movie, because Netflix is operated by idiots. And also a motorbike chase that mirrors the one in the Villainess except that it's shit, though at least its conclusion made me laugh.) And the plot doesn't really provide much of an excuse to care about anything that happens (it's a mixture of elements from the  Bourne films, plus Total Recall, plus rage-virus-zombies) until the last half hour or so.

  It's nuts, and I can perfectly understand why someone wouldn't like it; It made me think of Michael Bay several times (with a fraction of the budget but better technical chops.) It also reminded me of the camerawork at the end of I Robot, of all things. And Hardcore Henry. Which... well, would very understandably put some people off. Maybe the best way to think of this would be as more of a music video, something that's heavily stylized and shooting for something other than realism - balls out, impressionistic, constant action. Its energy is infectious.

 I mean, did I tell you about the first chase scene where a few vans try to box in the protagonist on a delivery bike in narrow Korean streets? Or a later one involving a truck full of pigs and a whole bunch of pursuit vehicles? There's a bit where someone is jumping between soldiers hanging from cords from helicopters while chasing a speeding train, and one where a guy uses a motorbike as a stepping stone while it's mid-wreck, sliding on the tarmac at high speed, to jump into a van. Two separate scenes with people jumping between moving vehicles and punching each other senseless.
 Awesome shit- the reason we watch these things in the first place, right?