Peninsula: The Walking Dead Abroad

As someone who worked on the digital marketing campaigns for The Walking Dead for a few seasons, I'm well aware that the most frustrating aspect of zombie movies -- and zombie TV shows for that matter -- is the habit of having characters take actions that serve no purpose except to attract the undead humans they're supposed to avoid. You can see what I mean in Peninsula when a treasure-seeker tries to extract a corpse from a van loaded with money instead of doing the logical thing: grabbing a bag of cash from the back then going on his way. His disastrous action isn't about greed; it's about attracting all the zombies in the vicinity. Which then turns the movie into a shooter game. Well, much of the world of Peninsula looks computer-generated so that aligns.

Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan sequel also suffers because it inserts a lot of unnecessary English, one assumes to attract American viewers. I honestly believe that this inclination, indeed this constant pressure, for artworks to be all things to all people is art's undoing. One need only look at Yeon's infinitely better vastly underrated Psychokinesis to see the man is hardly a one-hit wonder. And Peninsula is doing many things right: the family survival story, the military gone berserk story, the American imperialism story... I guess it's just that when you make movies as good as Train to Busan and Psychokinesis, I expect better. Even if this is better than most of the zombie content out there.

Revelations: Serial Killers Precede the Apocalypse

Director and screenwriter Yeon Sang-ho is shaping up to be a pretty interesting filmmaker. His breakout movie Train to Busan is one of the best zombie flicks out there while his equally delightful Psychokinesis gives the superhero genre a welcome refresh. Now with Revelations, he's delivering new life to serial killer thrillers. For in this strangely suspenseful feature, a recently released murderer (Shin Min-jae) with a dented head isn't the baddest bad guy on screen; that title goes to the zealous, pouty-mouthed pastor (Ryu Jun-yeol) whose mental collapse includes a string of misguiding if career-making hallucinations. Pursuing both men is a newly appointmed violent crimes detective (Shin Hyeon-bin) who has a history of her own with the former and a intuitive scepticism about the latter.

This structural shakeup — convict, evil; man of god, more evil — definitely keeps you on your toes, as we coast through rain-soaked abductions, almost-kills, and ghostly flashbacks. I also appreciate how Yeon has included a court psychologist to inject objective logic into story that's shaped in part by apparitions from the past, like a dead sister, a one-eyed monster, and — naturally — Jesus Christ. My only question at the end was a simple one: What's the powder in those packets consumed by the detective? Is it Fun Dip? Energy drink mix? Migraine medicine? Magic dust? A combo pack? Whatever it was, she might consider seeing a doctor in order to get a more effective prescription.

Jung_E: She Works Hard for the Money for Her Kid's Operation

As devoted mothers go, you'd be hard-pressed to find one as committed to the well-being of her child as Jung_E (Kim Hyun-joo) in the somewhat philosophically inclined sci-fi movie that bears her name. After spending her young daughter's formative years fighting the inevitable robot takeover of Planet Earth in order to raise money for her kid's cancer treatments, she then spends a posthumous second-life as an eternally cloneable brain inserted into a metal humanoid body that is the basis for that same child's military experiments. That her adult daughter (Kang Soo-yeon) has grown up to run a pilot program for the military industrial complex proves a disturbing way to honor her mother's memory, considering the work is all about mom being being pummelled and tortured in a recurringly fatal combat re-enactment. To reference the James Bond theme sung by Madonna, this noble lady survives only to "die another day."

The movie documenting mom's inability to become the ultimate war tool raises timely questions about immortality, genetic inheritance, human commodification, and, most of all, mankind's downward slide. But personally, I had a tough time admiring a woman who could make it her life's work watching her mother get beat up. I also didn't see the benefit in saving one of thousands of replicate brains so the android encasement could forge out its own existence... where and to what end? Yeon Sang-ho's action-packed flick should be commended for not devolving into pure video game nonsense (which is basically where it starts) but given his previous zombie classic Train to Busan, I wish he'd pushed his Woman vs. Machine narrative a little further than "one mimeographed mother has finally broken free of the System." That's good. It just could've been great.

Seoul Station: These Undead Are Dead to Me

Without a doubt, Train to Busan was a great horror movie, a great Korean movie, and just a great movie. Nevertheless I was trepidatious about watching its animated prequel Seoul Station which chronicles the day before the action in the live-action film. Sure, the writer-director is the same (Yeon Sang-ho) but "cartoon" movies, like superhero movies, often get on my nerves because the characters tend to be two-dimensional and the portrayal of women is as a rule offensive. Sadly, my grievances were unchallenged by Seoul Station which features a series of cardboard cut-outs who walk around looking like they've got diaper rash, and sweat what appear to be beads of rice or sleeping maggots. Visually, aside from the hordes of undead running around with bloodsplattered shirts, missing eyes, and varicose veins, Seoul Station isn't much to look at. And the storyline in which the primary female character (Shim Eun-kyung) is a prostitute with daddy issues didn't draw me in either.

With neither eye-candy nor a gripping narrative, I started to pick out holes in the plot. Like is there really only one hospital in Seoul? Would the cops really focus their attention on shooting non-infected people before they got to the zombies themselves? Do shattered car windows eventually just turn into empty windows? Are most Korean bathrooms built with windows that can be easily removed by hand without tools? If you break a window and then climb through, can you really walk right in with bare feet without worrying about broken glass? Is the best way to locate a single person in a giant city to go to the top of a high bridge and look around? If you were in a car and there was a struggle for the steering wheel between three people and you were the driver, would you continue to keep your foot on the gas pedal? And finally if separately, are all animators horny, lonely men who have issues with women and so they put the one female character of note in a dress that's so short that her spotless white underwear keeps appearing? Someone get those guys a date and hire someone else for the job next time.

Train to Busan: Zombies on Track

People are brain-dead. People might as well be dead for all the meaning their lives have. We can never escape the dead. So many meanings behind zombies in pop culture, right? Yet in a weird way, they're all related in that they all have to do with personal responsibility. If we're brain dead, who's fault is it? If our lives have no meaning, who could best change that? If we're haunted by our pasts, how do we reconcile ourselves to them? Thrillingly, Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busann addresses those big questions repeatedly instead of just serving us up the ravenous zombie, an image that frankly had started to decay.

What's changed isn't the zombies. Nope. They're still bloodthirsty, dangerous, infectious, crazed, and in this case, fast. It's the humans. In this very well-constructed, multi-layered script, Yeon has assembled a nice cadre of survivors: a ruthless investor (Gong Yoo), his sweet-natured daughter (Kim Soo-an), a big-hearted lug (Ma Dong-seok), his pregnant wife (Jeong Yu-mi), a shy baseball player (Choi Woo-sik), his girlfriend (Sohee) and a homeless guy (Choi Gwi-ha). You'll notice that all the women are defined by the men. A problem, agreed, but they're at least not completely helpless. Just watch that pregnant woman run!

And as the chemically-induced disease (caused by man's greed, what else?) spreads across South Korea (I'm guessing the North is safe), this small group (on a speeding commuter train out of Seoul) must fight with their paranoid peers (especially one deplorable businessman) as well as against the hungry hordes in order to survive. The rabidity of these zombies is something to behold, whether they're literally exploding through windows or racing up escalators, jumping on train cars or grasping on to the caboose (and then grasping on to the guy grasping on to the caboose, and then grasping on to the guy who's grasping on to the guy, etc.). The last time I saw a Korean horror movie this exquisite was Bong Joon-ho's The Host. Yes, Train to Busan is that good!