Review of The Host (2006) by Stuart P — 31 Mar 2010

So, some menacingly calm evil American scientist orders a not-too-bright South Korean lab assistant to pour gallons and gallons upon gallons of hissing, bubbling, steaming chemicals down the drain and into the Han River. What results is a cute looking two legged beast with a long tail, numerous flippers, and mouth like a sparsely toothed flower. This creature terrorizes the shores of the Han River, either swallowing Koreans or shakin'em around with it's tail, until the Park family, a family united by they're hatred for one another and their love for the youngest member, Hyun-seo, fights against it.

Not bad for a monster movie. It is interesting to watch these genre of movies from another culture's perspective. In the good ol' U.S. of A., monster movies are about gore and destruction. Japanese monster movies tend to reflect ecological concerns and the insignificance of humans. South Korea's THE HOST focuses on uniting a family and the benefits on drilling into the brains of those who are not particularly bright.

The effects are decent, and the acting better than what big-budget Hollywood can crank out when given a movie of this caliber (Matthew Broderick vs. Godzilla? Really?). The message of uniting the troubled family to save one of their own is very heavily focused upon, so much so that you soon forget about the cute flower-mouthed beastie and are actually genuinely surprised when it bothers to show up again. Evidently, South Koreans handle monster invasions differently than everyone else. Americans arm themselves. Japanese run in vast mobs. But South Koreans just stay the hell out of the area and hope the thing dies of boredom.

I also like how all the Americans in this movie were stupid looking and nonchalantly evil. The only one that wasn't died of an unnecessary lobotomy. Hmmm . . . ?

And of course, there were some eyebrow raising aspects to the film. For instance, the title: THE HOST. Nobody got hosted in this movie. There was some touch of "contamination virus" intrigue in the flick, and I ain't gonna tell you how that winds up, but the end result of the dilemma kinda disqualifies the meaning of titling the movie THE HOST. Otherwise, the only host in the film was the monster, in that it dropped small Hyun-seo into it's den and then keep returning. But, it wasn't much of a host. In fact, it never offered her a water or a chair or anything.

South Koreans are concerned when there is a monster eating the populace, they warn people away from the area, they want to kill it, but they don't really put forth a concentrated effort to do anything about it. That bothers me.

And then there is the insinuation of the positive aspect of lobotomies when the less-than-bright Gang-du is submitted, awake, screaming and begging, to two drills in his frontal lobe. He emerges smarter, stronger and faster. I emerged terrified and paranoid. Nothing good comes from randomly drilling into a person's brain. Just look at what it did to Randle McMurphy.

And I understand lobotomies are re-emerging into psychiatric medicine . . .

All of this aside, the most intriguing part of the film, for me, was the fact that South Koreans dry squid to an almost paper-thin consistency, and then grill it. How can you grill paper-thin squid? Wouldn't it just burn up?

All in all, I now have a jones to try South Korean paper-thin dried-n-grilled squid.