Chaw

Madman (2010)

R4 DVD

Korean with English subtitles

Following the success of The Host Korea seems to have fallen in love with maneating monsters. This time it’s a giant mutant pig. Left over from Japanese military experiment during the war, it and its kind have existed happily in the remote mountains of Korea but civilisation is encroaching onto its territory. Poachers are killing its food. It has been forced to turn to digging up fresh corpses from the cemetery and has got a taste for human flesh.

A young policeman has been sent to the village of Sameri as punishment for being overzealous at his job in Seoul. He arrives just as the desecration of the graves is being investigated. Other bodies, or bits of them, are turning up torn to pieces. An old hunter who lives in the village recognises the remains as the work of a wild boar. Since the village is trying to attract investment from weekend farmers the mayor goes into denial at the thought of anything spoiling his moneymaking ideas. Does this sound like the plot from that early movie about a large shark? Yes, it does.

When villagers are attacked he must admit defeat and hire some of Korea’s best hunters to go after the shark (sorry, pig). They kill a large pig, the mayor declares the case closed and everyone is happy except the chief hunter and the old man. They know it’s the wrong pig since they have cut open its stomach and not found the human remains expected. Somewhere out there is an even larger pig. It will not be happy that its mate has been killed. During the village celebrations that night the pig attacks in scenes that are not too far removed from the Australian film Razorback.

The next day a team of the hunters, an ecologist and the policeman set out to kill the pig (again). They find it has babies and use a piglet to lure the boar into a trap in an old factory, where it is killed with the aid of some old dynamite conveniently left lying around (in a factory? What did they make there?) . They may have got the boar but its progeny are still out there, growing bigger.

The film is dreadfully derivative – yes, you HAVE seen it all before – but it’s so well done that I was able to sit back and thoroughly enjoy it. There are just enough light moments built into the plot to make it more of a dark comedy than a monster movie and the ups and downs between humour and terror kept it interesting all the way through. The CGI is pretty good, although the mechanical pig has a lot of trouble turning corners. The characters are good if a little stereotyped, the acting is good, the photography is good. What more could you want in a mutant pig horror film?

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No. 3 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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