Director: Hwang Wook
Year: 2026
Country: South Korea
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
Plot:
Se-jong Joo survives in a rural backwater by brewing and selling bootleg alcohol with his two younger brothers. When a villager suddenly dies after drinking their liquor, the brothers race to the nearby town of Hwaseong to retrieve the remaining supply — before it can cause more harm and expose them. But Hwaseong has descended into madness. A pair of fanatical killers, Yeo and Nam, are rampaging through the town, slaughtering residents to fulfill a deranged obsession with collecting twelve bodies. As the streets turn into a living hell, the Joo brothers collide with the murderers, and what began as a desperate cover-up spirals into a brutal fight for survival. Their mission to reclaim the “killer alcohol” quickly unravels, trapping them in a town where death is both contagious and intentional.
Review:
Overall, this was an enjoyable if generally convoluted genre mash-up. Among the better features here comes from the strong sense of style, where it manages to mix these over-the-top scenarios filled with outside influences. The central setup involves the illegal-moonshine-sellers in town coming across the cult going around town trying to create a kind of sadistic ritual, while also setting up the stage for the film shoot in town to get caught up in the shenanigans of the whole town, making for a large cast of characters that need to be sold rather nicely. There’s enough going on here to keep this one going on with the kind of interactions throughout here, focusing on the brutal stalking scenes of the cult members going around trying to put together a bizarre ritual that offers up a slew of solid bloodshed during the kind of interactions featured here, and when it’s all brought together with the comedic interactions of the local officer investigating the crimes of the cult, bring about quite a lot of fun points here.
Other than that, though, the film’s convoluted sense of chaos takes place here, involving way too many subplots that are awkwardly inserted into the running time. The way the film brings the film crew into the mix by mistaking a drunkard from town as the body they’re going to use in their latest film shoot, and getting caught up in the violence in town when trying to investigate the work of the artist responsible is incredibly flimsy and makes for a wholly disjointed time trying to keep track of what’s going on involving all these different characters. When this is brought about with the other convergent storylines that involve the different characters in the town, the result is more confusion than anything else, with all of the different elements coming together in an awfully clumsy manner. As well, with some of the comedy not always being the funniest and requiring this to try selling the zany energy on its own, these are all enough to bring this down overall.
Overview: ***/5
An immensely solid and enjoyable genre mash-up, there’s a lot to like here, which makes this one likable enough to hold itself up over a series of flaws that keep it down. Those with an interest in this kind of approach or who are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like here, while most others turned off by these drawbacks will want to heed caution.
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