Most of the movies I saw at this year's TIFF were pretty much "eh," but this one made the trip worthwhile. It takes a lot to push the envelope on movie violence, but this film does it! I could tell while watching that it had multiple sequels written all over it, and sure enough, director Hong-seon Kim revealed during the post-screening Q&A that both a prequel and sequel are already in the works.
The structure is highly similar to ALIEN: dealing with a monstrous menace from inside a contained space. Instead of a spaceship and its crew, we have a ship that's being used to transfer criminals extradited from the Philippines to Korea. They stage an escape attempt that's plenty bloody, but things are just getting started.
Also on the ship is a humanoid biological experiment that gets freed in the turmoil. From this point on, the bloody mayhem kicks into fourth gear. The monstrous one-time human is a merciless killing machine like you've never seen before. He rips people apart with his bare hands and spares nobody. Dubbed "Alpha," he makes Freddy Kruger look like Santa Claus. The film includes a brief backstory on how he came into existence -- so you know that there's no way that this can be a singular appearance.
Hong-seon Kim has certainly put together an impressive high-octane splatterfest. I detected some Michael Haneke influence in that he seems to delight in confounding your conditioned expectations as to how things are going to unfold. Know going in that the surprises are many and nothing's sacred.
Not for the faint of heart -- to put it mildly -- but if you can take movies with graphic violence, this one's a not-to-miss. It definitely succeeds in making you look forward to continuation.
The structure is highly similar to ALIEN: dealing with a monstrous menace from inside a contained space. Instead of a spaceship and its crew, we have a ship that's being used to transfer criminals extradited from the Philippines to Korea. They stage an escape attempt that's plenty bloody, but things are just getting started.
Also on the ship is a humanoid biological experiment that gets freed in the turmoil. From this point on, the bloody mayhem kicks into fourth gear. The monstrous one-time human is a merciless killing machine like you've never seen before. He rips people apart with his bare hands and spares nobody. Dubbed "Alpha," he makes Freddy Kruger look like Santa Claus. The film includes a brief backstory on how he came into existence -- so you know that there's no way that this can be a singular appearance.
Hong-seon Kim has certainly put together an impressive high-octane splatterfest. I detected some Michael Haneke influence in that he seems to delight in confounding your conditioned expectations as to how things are going to unfold. Know going in that the surprises are many and nothing's sacred.
Not for the faint of heart -- to put it mildly -- but if you can take movies with graphic violence, this one's a not-to-miss. It definitely succeeds in making you look forward to continuation.