South Korea’s top box office hit of 2010 is as slick and swift an underworld thriller as you’ll find.
Tag: South Korea
Last chance: ‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird’- Kim Jee-won’s “Oriental Western” on Hulu
Kim Jee-won’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (South Korea, 2008) is a self-proclaimed “Oriental Western.” That about pegs this treasure hunt right out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by way of Peking Opera Blues and Dragon Gate Inn, set in thirties Manchuria and filled with Korean expatriates, Chinese bandits, Japanese occupiers, […]
‘The Wailing’ – South Korean horror on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Shudder
The Wailing (South Korea, 2016) is a thriller that takes a dark turn into supernatural horror. Kwak Do-won is Jong-goo, a somewhat dim underachiever cop who is way over his head investigating a double homicide in his little town. Jong-goo isn’t too bright but he’s a doting father to his smart little girl and there’s […]
‘The Mimic’ on Amazon Prime and Shudder
The ghost story The Mimic (South Korea, 2017) draws its premise a Korean myth of a tiger that mimics human voices to lure its victims into the forest, but it goes its own way from there. Hee-yun (Yum Jung-ah), still grieving over the unsolved disappearance of her son, moves from the city to her rural […]
‘The Host’ – Bong Joon-ho’s monster mash on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Criterion Channel
The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean monster movie hit, is neither a parody, subversion, or revision of the often campy horror movie genre. It stirs a stew of genre conventions, from political commentary to dysfunctional family satire to earnest emotional pathos, into an often thrilling monster movie as indebted to the B-movies of seventies American […]
Korean action epic ‘The Great Battle’ on Netflix
Grandly mounted and filled with sweeping battle scenes, the costume battle epic The Great Battle (South Korea, 2018), retells the true story of the invasion of Goguryeo, a kingdom on the Korean peninsula, by the Chinese Yang Empire in the 600s. Korean pop star Zo In-sung stars as General Yang, the commander of the Ansi […]