Welcome back to Dark Corners Streaming.
South Korean film Monstrum, which you can find on Shudder, is not the most original film out there,
but it is a fun one.
In medieval Korea, a monster is attacking local villages.
But is it real, or is it the creation of the duplicitous prime minister, trying to unseat the King?
The man charged with finding this out, is old warrior Yoon Gyeom –
and I may as well apologise now for my attempts at pronunciation –
along with his brother Sung han and daughter Myung played K-pop star Hyeri Lee.
The clues are mixed
and the film has a strong dramatic storyline before the action really hits.
And there is enough comedy, mostly courtesy of Sung Han, to prevent things getting too heavy.
The tone is squarely in the action adventure wheelhouse of recent hits like Red Notice, Army of the Dead, Army of Thieves and so on,
but on a much lower budget, meaning that this doesn’t have big name stars
or the camera flying all over the place, and is forced to fall back on character and script.
Which may be why I enjoyed it so much more than those other films.
To be fair, there may not be a single original idea or moment in this,
in fact, some of the lines could appear in anyone of a hundred other films,
only 90 or so made by Netflix.
The hero is unfailingly heroic,
the bad guy is really bad,
there’s the meet cute,
the obligatory comic sidekick,
and a complex backstory in a super cool set.
But while it box ticks these genre prerequisites,
it doesn’t lean on them.
It’s about the characters and they are engaging enough to follow,
likeable enough to root for and, just as importantly, fallible
so you genuinely worry about them and the outcome.
Rather than the apparently indestructible cliches wandering through a hail of bullets exchanging irreverent quips that have become the norm.
The effects, when they show up, are certainly good enough
and are well-used creating some memorable images.
The most obvious casualty of the budget is the camerawork,
particularly in the fight scenes...
where it does feel like a liability.
And while it’s not a bad looking film it’s quite standard,
not generating as much atmosphere as it feels like it could or should.
But I do think that’s a minor quibble in a film that I knew nothing about,
and quite simply enjoyed.
It's not perfect, I suppose it’s nothing special,
but it’s as much fun as this sort of film is meant to be and so seldom is.
If it was English language, it would already have spawned half a dozen rip-offs and sequels.
Thanks for watching. Action adventure is often dismissed as a serious genre yet is notoriously hard to get right,
what are the best of the breed, particularly those that are less well known? Let us know in the comments below.