South Korean Horror on Shudder

 Saturday was all about South Korean Horror via Shudder...

Train to Busan 

I'm on a South Korea horror kick, I guess. Revisited this again on Joe Bob's Last Drive-in.

The daughter telling her father he only cares about himself, so disappointed in him, that's the stuff I never wanted to hear from my own daughter. Granted, that comes as he is about to get a free pass out of a quarantine because he's a fund manager, who had to sell an entire stock due to a business's "minor" leak that leads to the zombie outbreak. Taking his daughter to her mom's was fate intervening on his behalf because he's on the train with her instead of at work where he more than likely would have been a zombie snack. Speaking of the subway terminal, the passengers still alive who narrowly escape a mass of military, police, citizenry, and others, all zombie speedsters feverishly stampeding towards them, set to a pulse-pounding score, is what this genre seems built for. But the initial outbreak on the train where an infected teenager bites the conductor's assistant and sets off this ever-growing horde -- wow, what a knockout start. Twisting, bone-crackling, bloody-teeth, growling, fast mothers just forwarding ahead for the next meal. Getting from Car 9 to Car 13, the fund manager, baseballer, and kindhearted working class tough needing to get to their daughter, cheerleader girlfriend, and pregnant wife, combating and fending off zombie passengers, lend support by a dark tunnel, is yet another kickass setpiece. The situation itself is familiar, so the characters we follow during it need to be accessible, relatable, and likable...or have an arc like the fund manager, often too caught up in his job to realize his daughter hasn't gotten the attention she deserves. Then there is the COO who puts his own safety above anyone else. Self preservation or self sacrifice...you get both in this film.

So much of the film is survival and getting to safety, with the amazing direction emphasizing how that seems to be increasingly difficult. How a certain few forgo conscience and morality to try and keep our heroes from getting into their car resulting in two dying (sisters are parted and those who get through are again separated when the despicable COO motivates his party of fellow self-absorbed assholes to send them into a vestibule) is indeed zombie movie plotting at it's dramatic height. The other sister deciding to punish the group by letting the horde in on them...what an extra punch. What a film.

And yes, as a father, the little girl singing the song meant for her beloved father, who sacrificed himself as the pregnant woman's husband had for her, their walk to safety finally affirmed, got those tears flowing. They got me, dammit.

Warning: Do Not Play

 Seo Ye-Ji is an aspiring filmmaker needing to carve out a story and have it prepared to develop for a production putting pressure on her (and a colleague working with her, giving her two weeks to "get her act together"), deciding on pursuing evidence (provided to her by a friend, Cha Yub, a barista at a coffee shop) of this supposed short film school project shot by a ghost and presented by Jin Seon-kyu to a mortified theater of students, many leaving the building in horror. So the film follows Ye-Ji's passionate and obsessive quest to gain access to that film in the hopes of inspiring her.

This is a film that hasn't a great deal of admirers, many of whom felt it was simply way too convoluted and purposely murky. That being said, I found Ye-Ji a compelling character, one with a traumatic backstory (abuse and attempted repeated suicide) and attraction towards dark subject matter. Just the fact that Ye-Ji continues on her path despite every reason to stop says something about how badly she wants to locate this notorious footage and investigate its origins and creative history (she has to steal the files from an archive and the crazed director's hardrive from his home after being warned by him in a meeting at a cafe to back off).

I think once the footage (basically a making-of and behind the scenes interactions with the little crew working with Seon-kyu, who eventually leaves them to be slaughtered by the evil spirit's manifestation) is seen by Ye-Ji and Cha, and Ye-Ji goes through her own mental and physical bouts with the spirit, the film can sort of carry us into quite a bit of madness. What happens on camera and what is seen by the likes of Ye-Ji and Seon-kyu are two different things, and how the evil spirit (of an actress who died during a 1980 production called "Warning", her presence resurfacing as the burned, bloody ghoul with intimidating eyes and long black hair...of course) misbehaves isn't always so clear and concise. I always felt disoriented, like not everything we see happen to Ye-Ji is actual, with some of it manufactured in her psyche and manipulated by the spirit.

Actually my favorite set piece is in Ye-Ji's apartment when the lights go out and she has to use her camera to see...this includes my favorite shot of the ghoul, emerging from the dark. The theater does have that "relic cool" to it, that dilapidated aesthetic I find quite attractive for my horror films about unoccupied and abandoned locations once again investigated by an unfortunate set of characters unaware of what lives within them. And "lost films", this actually dips its toes in "found footage" as well. I watched this from Shudder's "A Good Scare" collection. 

0.0 Mhz

 CGI birds, hair, old hag head with red eyes, and fire. Shaman exorcisms. Shaman spirit granny. Flashback with the body of a suicide falling to the floor after rotting from her head inside a cabin in the woods. Brainwaves monitored in order to hopefully make contact with help through cow liver and a special doll (and the "salt circle"). Man-hating spirit leaving the cabin of her "death capture" into the young sexy body of Yoon-young Choi while the dour Eun-ji Jung has to embrace her family's shaman gifts (despite being treased and bullied in her youth because of them) in order to help rid Choi of the possession. Standard Linda Blair head twist and white eyes, including mind manipulation in order to stop the exorcism (Sung-yeol Lee's brother died in a terrible accident when they were kids, so that is used to torment him). Shin Joo-Hwan is obsessed with Choi, plans to sell recordings of paranormal activity to the highest bidder but doesn't anticipate the man-hating spirit inside her when he goes to fuck her. Won-Chang Jung is who Choi really has a relationship with much to Joo-Hwan's jealousy and dismay, influenced by the spirit to drive a van off a road when he sees the spirit of a dead girl (I want to say it is the same dead girl Eun-ji saw earlier at the grocery store). 

Just college kids who are part of a club with an interest in the paranormal seizing upon this opportunity for a fun project not anticipating a serious evil motivated and perpetuated by using studied practices learned. The "fun and games turn to terror" tagline that popped in my head just now, corny as it is, seems fitting for this minor blip in the "evil spirit up to no good" possession horror subgenre. I didn't hate it at all. It was part of Shudder's "A Good Scare". I wouldn't say that happened to me, but I did really dig the electronic music throughout (a bit of CHUD vibed off the film to me), thought the performances were more than adequate (though the lead is glum and sour-pussed, mainly due to her misery at home and school life, currently a barista with a FML attitude), and the cabin itself (with the underground crawlspace) was really atmospheric. I'm sure there are better options out there, though, for this kind of film.