The Host

O

ne of the reasons that Halloween is my favorite holiday is that all of the cable channels show horror movies. A lot of them show crap like Halloween 75 and Nightmare on Elm Street 42, but occasionally I find something cool.

So G4 showed a Korean Film called "The Host". It was described as Comedy/Horror. (Thoughts of Saturday the 14th popped into my head...) but I watched it even though it was subtitled.

Normally, I HATE foreign films, especially Japanese films. Even when they remake Japanese horror films like that POS with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The Grudge), I hate them. But this was Korean, so I decided to give it a try.

The Characters (The names are too confusing, so I'll just describe their relationships)

Grandfather - Gdad
Blondie - Gdad's dimwitted son
Sun - An Olympian who looks like "Sun" from Lost. Gdad's daughter.
College Man (CM) - Gdad's other son who went to college and still has no job
DD - Blondie's 13 year old daughter

It starts out with some American Scientist telling a Korean scientist to pour all of the dusty Formaldehyde into the drain. The Korean says that it will go straight into the river. The American doesn't care.

A couple of years later, Blondie and Gdad are fishing and they see something odd swimming in the river. They don't know if it's a squid or what, but it's about the size of a quarter and it gets away.

Cut to a few more years later and Blondie is living with Gdad and DD. They have a food stand where they sell Ramen Noodles & grilled squid & stuff. One day, when Blondie and DD are watching the Olympics to see if Sun will win the gold medal in archery, a creature comes out of the river.

Blondie eats the "best leg" from one of the grilled squid that a customer had ordered. Gdad tells him to give the customer another order on the house. Blondie goes out to give them the new order when he sees everyone looking at something in the river. He throws a beer at the creature and everyone else starts throwing stuff at it too. Then Blondie sees the creature coming from the other side of the river. He gets DD and starts running. DD trips, and Blondie just grabs a hand and starts running from the ginormous creature running around on the shore. The creature is kind of a cross between Ripley's Alien, a lizard, and Moby Dick.

Blondie realizes that it's not DD's hand that he is holding. He's holding some other little girl's hand. Then he sees the the creature has DD and is taking her back into the river.

So the next scene we see is funny (to me). Everyone is having a memorial service for all of the people who died when the creature came out of the river. Blondie and his family are all crying and acting crazy. I can't even describe it. I just can't imagine anyone really acting like that IRL. It's sort of like when people throw themselves onto the coffin of a loved one. But there were no coffins, just pictures of everyone who had died.

The military comes in to quarantine everyone who might have had contact with the creature, or the people who'd come into contact with the people who might have touched the creature.

...

Yeah, I wrote that right. :-)

So then we find out that DD is alive and living in the sewers under the river while Blondie and his family are all in the hospital. DD manages to call her father (Blondie) and he starts trying to get out of the hospital to save his daughter.

I liked it. Watched it twice. If I see it on again I'll watch it then too. It was rated 7.1 out of 10 at imdb.com

Here's a clip from when the creature first attacks:


Check it out if you get a chance!