Song Kang Ho, Byun Hee Bong, Park Hae Il, Bae Doona, Go Ah Sung
Movie rating: 7/10 Neck score: A
We watched this one because besides being famous, it was the week of Halloween and we wanted to watch a scary movie... this movie is not scary. I would not count it as horror, more of just a monster movie- a baby on the scale of Gojira (Godzilla), but the same kind. In fact, when I found out that it was based on a real life event, when a Korean mortician working for the U.S. military dumped a bunch of formaldehyde down the drain and substantially into the Han River. This turns it, like Gojira , into an anti-American film, as it focuses more on the effects of American involvement and attitude. It is a political statement, not a horror movie. I would even say that the real monsters in the movie are not the actual monster, but the U.S. Military and how they handled the situation. The fact that they spread a mass virus hysteria because one of their soldiers died fighting the monster, while off duty, and that they would willfully turn Korean citizens into lab rats to cover their tracks just reinforces the theory. Then there is the obvious stab with the thinly veiled reference to
Agent Orange, renamed Agent Yellow, as the bio weapon used to combat the creature.
The monster itself is just not scary because this movie is old and I was super underwhelmed at the CGI. It was meant to look like a giant mutated salamander or some other kind of amphibian, and it actually made me giggle when it first came out and went on a rampage. But this was 2006, so try not to judge it too harshly. I feel like the CGI budget was used up on the scenes where the monster would swing on the bridges in the sewers to travel, and climb up the the walls down to the pit where it would spit out it's victims. It had moments of coolness, but was still an early example of CGI monsters at best... or maybe worst.
