Hey, kids, you wanna see the biggest blockbuster in the history of Korean cinema? No? How about the out-and-out scariest monster movie to come down the pike since, oh, Aliens?
There, I thought so. The monster who pops out of the Han river to terrorize Seoul in Bong Joon-ho's wildly entertaining The Host sure is an elaborately ugly thing (imagine if the Alien creature concept was based on a prawn), but how it looks isn't nearly as jump-out-of-your-seat startling as how and when it shows up. And the out-and-out scariest bits in the film aren't when the creature is attacking, but when one of its lead characters — most particularly the plucky little girl heroine, Park Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung), who's been kidnapped and stowed away by the creature — is waiting for it to attack.
When the movie isn't being scary, it's crazily funny, so much so that critical watchers will wonder if Bong might tilt the balance of the picture too far in a comic direction and water down the scares. He doesn't. Instead, he gets both laughs and cheers for Park Hyun-seo's ridiculously dysfunctional clan, including her super-dense dad (Song Kang-ho, who played a somewhat similarly deficient detective in Bong's excellent 2003 thriller Memories of Murder) and crossbow-wielding aunt. Their story is forefronted as all of Seoul goes into a panic, and the Korean authorities are shunted aside by U.S. military personnel (who, a prologue shows, are responsible for the creature's creation in the first place), who then screw things up even further. I understand that some people are particularly sensitive about other countries giving us a hard time in their movies (I always figured the U.S.A. was tough enough to take it); still, the America-bashing in this picture is done in such a blandly matter-of-fact fashion that it registers as much funnier than it might have.
But the movie is hardly a full-fledged satire; part of what makes it so enjoyable is how much stuff it contains while never losing sight of its prime directive, which is to thrill and terrify. The movie's finale is dauntingly different from what a Hollywood version of this picture might have offered. Leaving my first viewing of The Host, I thought I would have really loved the movie even if its ending had copped out.
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
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