Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
SEO In-guk, JANG Dong-yoon, JUNG So-min, SUNG Dong-il
Intro:
… this full-force blast of red plasma is an absolute ride from start to finish.
Gore can be a great asset. When used right, it can provide either a harrowing and brutal experience, or an opportunity to spend a couple hours wincing with a wide grin on your face. Blood and guts may be easy to replicate for cheap but keeping their expulsion engaging is a bit trickier. KIM Hongsun’s Project Wolf Hunting should be used as an example of how to make gorehound cinema right.
Hongsun takes some creative cues from a lot of international contributions to the aestheticisation of violence on film. The explosive opening visually references Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs; a group of prisoners extradited against a burnt-orange sunset a la Con Air; enough blood to rival early Peter Jackson; and its spray to make Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Dragon Chef) jealous.
It’s a veritable smoothie of the red stuff, and while the characterisation isn’t nearly as razor-sharp, the performances are engaging enough to make it stick. SEO In-guk as Jong-du in particular deserves praise for being such an aggressively watchable bastard.
The story starts out much like Con Air on the water, with the transport of a bunch of dangerous criminals going awry on a massive carrier ship, and for the first hour-or-so, it’s absolute carnage. To the point where it ventures a little too close to the line where the constant violence and bloodshed starts to get numbing.
And then the film shifts gears. Several times. The main way that this film keeps itself fresh is that it basically turns into completely different films, one right after the other. That impending feeling of repetition turns into something of an asset, with the filmmakers lulling the audience into a false sense of sanguine security just to blow some minds in a completely different fashion than is shown on-screen. It’s as if From Dusk Til Dawn didn’t stop at just the vampire riff and kept throwing even more ideas forward, and as outright gonzo as it turns out, there’s a weird sense of cohesion to it all.
Throughout, even with the positively delightful gore, the core idea always rings through about this kind of behaviour. The misanthropic, nihilistic disregard of other human beings as just bags of muscle and blood, turns the initial ‘prisoners fight back’ conceit into a starting point to question those that allow for these scenarios to take place.
Like Natural Born Killers, the South Korean film has difficulty in balancing its bloodlust with critique, but throughout those tonal shifts, it still manages to deliver some salience with the overriding idea.
Project Wolf Hunting is where Con Air meets Overlord. Those with even the slightest of squeamish stomachs need not apply, as this full-force blast of red plasma is an absolute ride from start to finish. It may try to have its squashed grapefruit cake and eat it too, but this level of willingness to go completely buckwild in filmmaking is worth cherishing. Get some mates together for one hell of a movie night.
