The Host

Gwoemul (2006)

Directed by: Joon-ho Bong

Written by: Joon-ho Bong, Jun-won Ha, Chul-hyun Baek

Starring: Kang-ho Song, Hie-bong Byeon, Hae-il Park, Ah-sung Ko, Du-na Bae

Righto. Big Korean monster movie. The best good old fashioned monster movie I've seen in a while, actually. That I can think of, anyway.

It's about this giant fish monster which comes up out of the Han River (in Seoul) and starts attacking people left right and centre. It grabs a little girl and takes her to it's underground lair, which means her loser family has to come and rescue her. Meanwhile, all this other stuff is going on, about this virus or whatever. I dunno. I didn't completely get it, but that wasn't too irritating (I'm blaming the cultural differences, yet again. And the dub job. Man, that was funny. It sounded like a Knox cartoon or something. Visit www.knoxskorner.com and watch the videos to understand what I mean. I adore his stuff. It doesn't make any sense, but it's retarded funny).

Moving on. I wouldn't say that the movie is on par with Jaws, as the box would have me believe (stupid box). I mean, Jaws is Jaws. Nothing else can be Jaws. Even if something were on par with Jaws, it wouldn't count because it wasn't Jaws. You follow? However, it's sort of along the same lines as Slither or Shaun of the Dead 'cept without any zombies, and a hell of a lot better than the last Godzilla movie. You know, the one with Matthew Broderick.

So yeah, it's pretty funny, and the monster is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It was like this giant fish thing with all these legs and a prehensile tail and, like, a beak. Not only was it eye-bustingly awesome, whoever came up with that thing deserves a medal or something (the way it moved alone was amazing), but it looked surprisingly realistic. It was some of the best CGI work I've ever seen. I guess what with Korea being pretty much the video game capital of the Universe, it kind of stands to reason. I guess Weta Workshop had something to do with it, too. Cool, huh?

Anyway, yeah. I liked it. It was just generally well done, and should join the ranks of the great monster movies of all time (though not Jaws, I guess. Well, why not. I don't care).

It was fab.

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