Your Chirping Cricket was recommended to watch The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), the highest grossing film in South Korea. In the horror genre, this is a great monster movie, with a sense of humor and an actually sensible plot. The story revolves around a rather dim-witted man who loses his daughter to an amphibian monster from the Han River. Believing she has died, he grieves with his father, brother and sister. On the last battery power of a cell phone, she calls to tell she is somewhere in a big sewer. The remainder of the film, we follow the family in their chase to find her, while they break out of quarantined hospitals, obtain a truck and a map of the sewerage system with the family’s savings, and attack the monster. It kills the grandfather and the three siblings get separated. The brother is able to trace the girl’s call to the north side of Wonhyo Brigde, but he is betrayed by people who are chasing him for reward money. Meanwhile the young girl remains trapped in the monster’s lair with other victims. The only other one alive in the pit is a homeless kid who is even more scared than her. She tries to climb out by making a rope of clothes, but it catches her again with its tail and then gulps her and the kid in its ferocious mouth.
At this point, Seoul is in uproar as the government has decided to employ Agent Yellow to eradicate the monster and the deadly virus of which it is supposedly the host. The monster attacks the protesters but is incapacitated by the chemical fumes. The three siblings reunite and the girl’s father takes his chance to pull out his daughter as well as the little kid from the monster’s hideous mouth. She has suffocated despite holding on to one of the monster’s teeth. In his anger the father attacks the monster with a street pole, but all that achieves is that it wakes it up. The brother attacks it with fire bombs made of soju bottles. Then a homeless man pours gasoline over the monster, and the sister, a national arching medalist, shoots a flaming arrow into its eye, while the girl’s father rams the pole through its mouth and pierces its brain. With the monster dead, he checks on the little kid and finds that he is still alive. He decides to adopt him as he was with his daughter in the monster’s pit. Months later, when they are having dinner, the news on the TV announces in the background that the “disease crisis” was a case of “misinformation.” They just turn it off.
In fact, we knew from the beginning that the monstrous creature was a mutant amphibian caused by deliberate formaldehyde spillage into the Han River. And that is the running political commentary in this film. For it was an American military pathologist who ordered the formaldehyde to be dumped down the drain; it was the American military that quarantined everyone who got near the monster because of a deadly virus that never existed, and then ordered to perform a frontal lobotomy on the girl’s father; and it was the American military that employed Agent Yellow (a thinly veiled reference, of course, to Agent Orange). The monster, in other words, is a metaphor for America’s military presence in South Korea, and the family’s resilience is an ode to self-reliance and national sovereignty. The monster itself is quite a marvel of a mutant hybrid, with its elegant acrobatics, its clumsy legs, its ugly jaws and frightful tail. Interesting, too, is that the monster creature appears almost at the beginning, unlike in so many other films of the “creature from the deep” genre. The film is not screaming bloody gore, it has intelligent drama at the heart of the story, and the action scenes are highly entertaining. You might want to watch it, too.
At this point, Seoul is in uproar as the government has decided to employ Agent Yellow to eradicate the monster and the deadly virus of which it is supposedly the host. The monster attacks the protesters but is incapacitated by the chemical fumes. The three siblings reunite and the girl’s father takes his chance to pull out his daughter as well as the little kid from the monster’s hideous mouth. She has suffocated despite holding on to one of the monster’s teeth. In his anger the father attacks the monster with a street pole, but all that achieves is that it wakes it up. The brother attacks it with fire bombs made of soju bottles. Then a homeless man pours gasoline over the monster, and the sister, a national arching medalist, shoots a flaming arrow into its eye, while the girl’s father rams the pole through its mouth and pierces its brain. With the monster dead, he checks on the little kid and finds that he is still alive. He decides to adopt him as he was with his daughter in the monster’s pit. Months later, when they are having dinner, the news on the TV announces in the background that the “disease crisis” was a case of “misinformation.” They just turn it off. In fact, we knew from the beginning that the monstrous creature was a mutant amphibian caused by deliberate formaldehyde spillage into the Han River. And that is the running political commentary in this film. For it was an American military pathologist who ordered the formaldehyde to be dumped down the drain; it was the American military that quarantined everyone who got near the monster because of a deadly virus that never existed, and then ordered to perform a frontal lobotomy on the girl’s father; and it was the American military that employed Agent Yellow (a thinly veiled reference, of course, to Agent Orange). The monster, in other words, is a metaphor for America’s military presence in South Korea, and the family’s resilience is an ode to self-reliance and national sovereignty. The monster itself is quite a marvel of a mutant hybrid, with its elegant acrobatics, its clumsy legs, its ugly jaws and frightful tail. Interesting, too, is that the monster creature appears almost at the beginning, unlike in so many other films of the “creature from the deep” genre. The film is not screaming bloody gore, it has intelligent drama at the heart of the story, and the action scenes are highly entertaining. You might want to watch it, too.
