Deranged: I'll Drink to This One

It's hard to believe that the highly effective disaster pic Deranged was released years before COVID-19 changed our world; director Park Jeong-woo's heartracing horror movie feels as if it were made in direct response to our ongoing pandemic. Apparently, tragedies like the Coronavirus and HIV have followed the same patterns as the flu of 1919 and H1S1 (which is indeed referenced in an early moment of Park's film). Has mankind learned nothing from history? The answer is always, yes and no. In Deranged, the nightmare is ecological and biological, governmental and economical: a lab-generated, mutant horsehair worm has morphed and jumped species so that now humans are being ravaged by the freaky, squiggly parasite.

The onset symptoms are fairly inconspicuous: an increase of appetite, a building thirst. Who hasn't had days — or weeks — when they were especially hungry for no good reason or decided to pursue the idealized eight glasses a day? So you can't expect a drug rep (Kim Myung-min) or a low-level cop (Kim Dong-won) to immediately register that something's wrong with their family members, especially since the two brothers are both burdened by insurmountable debts and working two jobs to make ends meet. What you can expect, per usual, is that the pharmaceutical companies will be putting profit above public concern when the egg-infested shit hits the fan. The worst part is that nowadays, the idea that Big Pharma is actively creating a self-serving hellscape isn't the least bit far-fetched. Everyone has pretty much accepted that drug companies are evil. In Deranged, worms control some people's brains; money controls the minds of others.