2006 Korean monster movieRating: 9/20
Plot: Stupid Americans! Their army dumps formaldehyde (I think that's what they said) into the river and for reasons that don't make scientific sense, a reptilian, many-tentacled monster is born. It starts killing and dragging people off, including Park Hyun-Seo. The rest of the Park family have to find her.
This is a lot of frenetic, head-scratchin' action sequences with a herky-jerky CGI tentacle-flailing monster juxtaposed with calm scenes of dopey characters sharing moments that I assume are supposed to be poignant or humorous. It was hard to tell because the dubbing didn't match the subtitles, and neither made much sense to me. This isn't like those horror/monster movies where the makers don't let you see the monster or only reveal the monster a little bit at a time. No, you get to see the thing pretty early on, and I thought it looked pretty silly. Alternating between phallic and vaginal, this thing could be a Freudian's nightmare, but if you've got no interest in psychoanalyzing the special effects team, I don't think it would be of much interest to anybody. Maybe I should give this movie credit for trying to do something a little different with the monster movie genre, but it's got this ultra-modern flavor (read: it sounds and looks really loud) that I find annoying. The Host focuses on a family of four rather than society in general as with a Godzilla movie, and that doesn't help matters either since I didn't care for the Park family. The ending was especially yucky.
This had gotten a lot of good reviews when it came out, but the whole thing left me kind of flat. There are a few good scenes, but overall it seemed like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be tongue-in-cheek, or real horror. A 12.
ReplyDeleteI give this thing an 11, for a lot of the reasons you two give it your scores.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading all these great reviews for this thing, and as a true aficionado of giant monster movies, I thought that they had finally made a great, modern one.
It was mostly a failure though. I thought Cloverfield was badly flawed, but it was better than this, and thats a bad sign for any giant monster movie.
Good review, by the way.