Tomb of the River: Paid in Blood

This movie has too much stabbing for my taste. There's also plenty of — somehow more acceptable — men wielding pipes but these secondary gangfights always build to a stabbing so the pipe-brawls feel like they're basically teasers for what's yet to come. As to who's killing whom in Yoon Young-bin's jopok joint Tomb of the River, I don't know if it matters. Everyone's playing king of the hill here: power-grabbing Min-seok (Jang Hyuk), slow-witted if loyal Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong), eternal second banana Cheong-seop (Lee Hyun-kyun), traitorous Mu-Sang (Kim Joon-bae), and the archetypal godfather (Park Jeong-hak) because where would a movie like this be without him. Most of these thugs are going to take one to the heart (via multiple stabs, regardless of rank). Interestingly, the best standoff ends up being a fistfight between two secondary henchmen. Kapow!

After the majority of ToTR's riffraff gets offed, the central conflict looks as though it might shift from gang versus gang versus gang to dirty businessman versus dirty cop. No such luck. The primary detective (Park Sung-Geun) has verbal swagger but can't walk the talk. A sleazy businessman (Song Young-kyu) enters the game late and leaves early. Stab, stab, stab. The body count is high. The final face-off takes place between exactly whom you'd expect: two well-dressed hoodlums. The underlying question turns out not to be whether the good bad guy or the bad guy is going to come out on top. It's whether there's really any difference when you're building Asia's biggest casino right before the next Olympics.

The Human Trap: Murder on the Orient Campsite

The conventional trope for horror movies that take place in the woods is to have a handful of young 20-somethings (with no cellphone service) terrorized by a deranged slasher driven by motives rooted in the past. But writer-director Lee Moon-young isn't adhering to the rules with his low-budget fright flick The Human Trap. The crazy guy roaming the woods? Not necessarily the killer. The two couples communing with nature? Neither romantic nor platonic. Oh sure, Ki-young (Kim Dong-ho) has known Jeong-ho (Park Yeon-woo) since the two men were in high school. But that doesn't make them friends. Similarly, Ji-ae (Kang Byeol) may be the boss of Chae-Rim (Kang Seung-hyun). But that doesn't mean these women are pals. To the contrary, the message of The Human Trap is this: Good friends are impossible to find!

You may guess that the camp guide (Song Young-kyu) is the villain. Or Doctor Ma (Moon Won-joo). Or the insane, unshowered guy (Kim Ki-nam) running around the forest and stealing supplies. And you wouldn't be wrong. But you wouldn't be right either. Not totally. Because The Human Trap is more misanthropic than your run-of-the-mill scary movie. Like those tricky Agatha Christie mysteries of yore: Everyone is suspect because everyone is base. The nicest person in The Human Trap isn't the hero. It's the one who survives. You'd be a fool to trust any of them! And watch out for the bear traps.