Ever since Boris Karloff first rose, groaning stiffly, from Dr. Frankenstein's slab, the horror genre has been subject to an unusual amount of critical woolgathering, as wave after wave of serious-minded reviewers dissect every slavering creature and bump in the night in search of a trendy metaphor. Viewed under such a microscope, Night of the Living Dead forever carries the weight of Vietnam, The Exorcist becomes a worst-case scenario of foulmouthed Woodstock youth, and the moist, endlessly inventive bio-horror of David Cronenberg gets saddled with the epidemic of the moment. (As the director has repeatedly stated in interviews, to pigeonhole The Fly as a simple AIDS parable is to diminish much of its goopy, tragic universal majesty.) While such readings can certainly be fun to bat around at the bar, this eggheaded approach often strikes me as being needlessly reductive, attributing weighty, conscious motives to filmmakers whose primary goal at the time was to find a novel way to scare the pants off viewers.
The new South Korean film The Host can be analyzed through a variety of Coke-bottle lenses: Potentially, it's a seriocomic exploration of the disintegration of the modern family unit, a condemnation of modern waste-disposal practices, or a cynical, post-SARS view of ineffectual crisis management. Mainly, though, it stands as an absolutely corking giant monster movie, told with more panache and verve than anything since the lean and hungry glory days of Spielberg. Critically speaking, that's more than enough for me.
Stranger Personals
Stemming from a real-life incident, director Bong Joon-Ho's film begins with a prelude at a U.S. Army base in Seoul, with an American bigwig (B-movie mainstay Scott Wilson) pressuring an underling to dispose of oodles of used formaldehyde by dumping it down the drain. Flash forward a few years, and a giant, toothy tadpole thing begins munching its way through the populace. In one early attack, it makes off with the teenage daughter of slow-witted lunch-cart clerk Gang-du (Song Kang-ho). After the government launches an ineffectual quarantine in response, Gang-du and the rest of his squabbling family—overly nostalgic father, boozy younger brother, archery-champion sis—take to the sewers themselves, in hopes of finding their prize before she gets gobbled up.
Such a no-holds-barred, straightforward genre movie initially comes as a bit of a shock from a filmmaker such as Bong, whose earlier projects hinted at a somber, glacially paced art-house sensibility. (His previous best-known film, 2003's Memories of Murder, was a police procedural methodical enough to make David Fincher's Zodiac seem like a madcap comedy.) Here, though, the filmmaker seems to get drunk on the possibilities of the subject matter, and his enthusiasm spills messily over into the audience. Nowhere is this glee more apparent than in the insta-classic opening scene, in which the creature launches an attack on a densely populated picnic area in broad daylight. From the first barely comprehensible glimpse of the creature to the final moments of all-out carnage, the sequence carries a visceral, go-for-broke rush that's hard to do justice to in print. (According to a friend of mine who saw its initial screening at Cannes last year, even the snootiest, tuxedo-clad members of the audience went absolutely apeshit.) While things slow down a tad during the film's middle stretch, with a little too much time spent on fruitless chases and bureaucratic blunders, chances are you'll be too busy buzzing from that astounding opening to care. Thankfully, things rebound in a big way during the climax, with emotional beats that ricochet between tragic and exhilarating, before ending in a coda that strikes a wistful, cautionary note.
Ultimately, of course, a monster movie is really only as good as its central character, and, man alive, have Bong and his team of effects wizards ever created a beauty. Fleet-footed, slimy, and prone to regurgitation at the most inconvenient of times, the monster serves as a reminder of the simple, goofy pleasures that a well-made creature feature can induce. I've seen The Host three times now, and my admiration for the film feels undimmed by repetition. Even when glimpsed through the cruddiest of bootlegs, its central character takes its (his? hers?) place among Kong, the Alien Queen, and Godzilla as creatures whose mythology, personality, and iconic status arrive fully formed. Movie magic? You're soaking in it.
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