Train to Busan. (15.)
Directed by Sang-ho Yeon.
Starring Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Yu-mi Jeong, Dong-seok Ma, Woo-sik Choi, Ahn So-hee. Korean with 118 mins
As a nation you never forget your first big zombie hit. I can still feel the sense of pride after seeing Shaun of The Dead, knowing that we could do a genre film that could hold its head up high anywhere in the world, and Koreans are now experiencing something similar with this zippy little zombies-on-a-train number that looks set to repeat its domestic success around the world.
We have had walking dead/ running dead/ talking dead/ rehabilitated dead/ precocious child dead/ cockney dead and even not actually dead dead (it's a virus, innit), so there isn't much space left for genuinely new angles, but this offers a few nice tweaks to the formula. The zombies here are of the high speed variety but they have a swarming capability that seems new. Dancers were cast as the undead and unlike the usual staggering-home-from-the-pub zombie motions, these are fearsomely fast and frenetic, dropping out of the sky or throwing themselves out of high windows. In some of the most striking sequences they seem to be working together to break through glass or forming inhuman pyramids to get at the living.
The train location, an express from Seoul to second city Busan (or sometimes Pusan), reminds us that Zombie films are as much disaster movies as horror, and the narrative sets up the usual selection of strangers brought together by adversity. The story though concentrates on a father and daughter: a fund manager whose marriage failed because he was too busy working and now doesn't spend enough time with his (slightly whiny) daughter, who is going to be taught the error of his way in the most forceful way possible. Korea is one of the most work obsessed societies on earth and the film really pushes its work/life balance, anti business message. (It also has the standard don't trust the government angle of all zombie films but given a topical edge domestically by the government's inept and evasive handling of the 2014 ferry disaster in which nearly 400 people, mostly teenage students, died.)
Children in horror films are rarely a good thing. Soo-an Kim plays the daughter and she is freakishly and unnerving realistic. Hopefully she's just a really good child actor because she really, really looks like she is being traumatised by the experience. You want to tell her that this is not real it's all pretend.
You will come away from this with an enormous regard for the Korean railway system and its abundantly staffed trains and modern, sturdy rolling stock, which enables infected carriages to be locked up and effectively quarantined. A zombie attack would make short work of the average British choo choo, though if it was a Southern commuter train from Brighton the sheer weight of numbers standing shoved together in the aisles would slow them up and as the train would probably be at a standstill the survivors of the initial attack could probably all jump off and run away.
Directed by Sang-ho Yeon.
Starring Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Yu-mi Jeong, Dong-seok Ma, Woo-sik Choi, Ahn So-hee. Korean with 118 mins
As a nation you never forget your first big zombie hit. I can still feel the sense of pride after seeing Shaun of The Dead, knowing that we could do a genre film that could hold its head up high anywhere in the world, and Koreans are now experiencing something similar with this zippy little zombies-on-a-train number that looks set to repeat its domestic success around the world.
We have had walking dead/ running dead/ talking dead/ rehabilitated dead/ precocious child dead/ cockney dead and even not actually dead dead (it's a virus, innit), so there isn't much space left for genuinely new angles, but this offers a few nice tweaks to the formula. The zombies here are of the high speed variety but they have a swarming capability that seems new. Dancers were cast as the undead and unlike the usual staggering-home-from-the-pub zombie motions, these are fearsomely fast and frenetic, dropping out of the sky or throwing themselves out of high windows. In some of the most striking sequences they seem to be working together to break through glass or forming inhuman pyramids to get at the living.
The train location, an express from Seoul to second city Busan (or sometimes Pusan), reminds us that Zombie films are as much disaster movies as horror, and the narrative sets up the usual selection of strangers brought together by adversity. The story though concentrates on a father and daughter: a fund manager whose marriage failed because he was too busy working and now doesn't spend enough time with his (slightly whiny) daughter, who is going to be taught the error of his way in the most forceful way possible. Korea is one of the most work obsessed societies on earth and the film really pushes its work/life balance, anti business message. (It also has the standard don't trust the government angle of all zombie films but given a topical edge domestically by the government's inept and evasive handling of the 2014 ferry disaster in which nearly 400 people, mostly teenage students, died.)
Children in horror films are rarely a good thing. Soo-an Kim plays the daughter and she is freakishly and unnerving realistic. Hopefully she's just a really good child actor because she really, really looks like she is being traumatised by the experience. You want to tell her that this is not real it's all pretend.
You will come away from this with an enormous regard for the Korean railway system and its abundantly staffed trains and modern, sturdy rolling stock, which enables infected carriages to be locked up and effectively quarantined. A zombie attack would make short work of the average British choo choo, though if it was a Southern commuter train from Brighton the sheer weight of numbers standing shoved together in the aisles would slow them up and as the train would probably be at a standstill the survivors of the initial attack could probably all jump off and run away.
