Fantasia 2026.05: "Pimple", Our Effed Up World, CineMapsosa '26, Beasts Clutching at Straws '26, "Best Friends with the Devil", and Penny Lane Is Dead

Back to the "de Sève in the afternoon, Hall in the evening" grind (for one of the more pleasant definitions of "grind")!

We start off with composer Freya Berkhout, actress Jess McLeod, and writer/director/producer Alice Maio Mackey for Our Effed Up World (with host Justine Smith), which feels like an interesting turn for Mackey in that the trans and nonbinary characters are supporting roles and there was a lot of wanting to see folks like herself up front in her previous films. Maybe not that big a deal, but interesting in terms of whether she's going to have a more commercial career at some point; she mentioned "an IP thing" as part of what's next at the end of the Q&A.

She mentioned that they lucked out finding a video store that could be used as a set, including the genuinely sketchy basement which apparently smelled terrible, but you don't have time or money to clean it on an indie budget. The range of influences for this one was an odd mix, more Kevin Smith and Australian soap operas than the genre elements. I must admit that it's kind of odd to hear "gen-X" as more of an aesthetic description than "the people you grew up with", and folks from Australia talking about something as CW-inspired is kind of like seeing "Black Friday" sales abroad; it feels like it should be a specifically American term since they would be connecting it to something else within their culture, right?

(Also, did Mackey have a tremor last year? She had this thing where she was swinging the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth and it wasn't quite like we could only catch the syllables where it passed in front of lips, but it was oddly distracting!)

After that, I took a meal break because I have not see Pontypool since its original release and wasn't really up for a Bruce McDonald/Steven McHattie talk (though some friends back home would have loved it). After that, it was back to de Sève for the Korean shorts block, with filmmakers Lee Chang-bee ("I Love Your Alter Ego"), Lee Min-hyun ("Wish You Were Dead"), and Park Jung-yoon ("TROPIC") between the Fantasia hosts/translators. Very fun group of shorts!

Then, across the street for Beasts Clutching at Straws and Penny Lane Is Dead, with writer/director Mia'Kate Russell and actresses Alexandra Jensen & Sophia Wright, the latter of whom create very different impressions without the costumes and hairstyles from the movie, with Wright joking that half of being able to be Kat was wearing that outfit, and also joking about how the days when it was an all-woman set were different than when men were around, even if it was just as violent and gory.

Then to bed. Tuesday wound up being Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, a good burger because I was very late to the pass line for Someone's Daughter, and Los Vampires. And, man, I can't believe this has taken me so long to finish that today's the festival's last day, where you'll likely find me at The Peril at Pincer Point, City War, The Fox, Freaks Part II, and Jim Queen. Kind of half tempted to rearrange things to see Gozu, but also trusting that it playing here means some midnight shows back home and a spiffy new disc are on the way.


"Borbulha" ("Pimple")

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

A pretty simple but entertaining gross-out short from Portugal with Tiago Rodrigues as a kid with a really noticeable pimple getting picked on by bullies until they decide to pop it and, man, they are not going to like what comes out.

I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first pus monster I've seen, but it's impressively gross and filmmaker Fernando Alle uses an impressive combination of gore effects, stop-motion, and puppetry to have it manifest and take out the little brats. The movie is just four minutes long, but Alle crams every beat needed from Rodrigues being sullen to the three victims having individual reactions and a funny denouement. Simple idea exceptionally well-executed!

Our Effed Up World

☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

Alice Maio Mackay has been making micro-budget genre movies that festivals pick up even when they were very rough since she was a teenage girl, and even without the way she spoke in the Q&A after the screening, this is the first time that I find myself wondering what kind of filmmaker she's going to wind up being. She's clearly still learning and straddling the line between making a movie for a broader audience and making it for herself, but Our Effed Up World is fairly watchable.

It follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), who works in a supermarket with bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), hanging out afterward with Finn (Jess McLeod) and Ash (Karis Oka) at the video store Finn's uncle left them. She's just resolved to dump boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), who doesn't take it particularly well, wandering about until he comes upon a strange and dangerous meteor - the sort of thing Sheri's astronomer father Hank (Scott Major) knows about because it's his job to watch out for such things.

A major part of the growing pains here are that, both by the amount of time spent and from what she said in the introduction, Mackay is mostly trying to make a hangout film with alien zombies to spice things up, and the latter almost feels like a crutch: The sci-fi/horror is not particularly memorable, and rather than resonating with the characters, mainly seems like an excuse to have them do something other hanging around and saying catty things. That's enjoyable enough in large part because Mackay has a more seasoned cast than usual - Sara Thompson has plenty of higher-profile credits, Scott Major is a bona fide veteran actor, and Annapurna Sriram is a natural goofy best friend - who are mostly able to slip comfortably into character rather than just recite lines on cue.

Those lines are sometimes more than a bit in need of a polish - the scene where Sheri dumps Harry especially makes her feel mean rather than frustrated or fed up - and It's kind of important to remember how young Mackay is because, although she's become a staple of festivals and other programs that want to showcase trans filmmakers, she's actually just now at the age where young filmmakers start working professionally, and only starting to actually be good. This movie still clanks, but not as often or as badly as the last one, which wasn't as rough as the one before that.

Which means I'm not sure whether I'd rather see her continuing to hone her skills or see how she does directing someone else's script, because you can really feel how this film lacks a lot of the connective tissue that ties one moment or aspect of a character to another, or does it awkwardly. Working with a more professional cast helps, but this is still very much someone learning the ropes and feels like it.


"SPEEDY!"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

"Child learns the awful truth that adults lie" isn't necessarily a plot that scale to a feature-length film, but it's something that can certainly sing at the length of a short, and this one is charming as all get-out, getting a lot of great mileage from how ridiculous this speed-reading scam can seem when it's not held up by folks you should be able to trust, but, hey, Jung-min might have a bit of a crush on the teacher's prodigy son. The actress NAME turns in a really delightful performance as a bright girl who is shouldering a lot and but still feels like a kid.

The movie also hits its period marks nicely on top of being very earnest about what it can be like on a family that's striving for better but knows it might take some luck, or suddenly finding yourself complicit in something that's maybe not a crime but isn't right.

"Soulmate" '26

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

There may be one too many alter-egos in this movie, between Ji-eun (Jeong Ji-eun), "hot girl Ji-eun" - the persona she adopts as a young actress - and Eun-ho (Kim Mi-ran), the result of dissociative personality disorder brought on by her stepfather's abuse. I spent an embarrassing chunk of this 20 minute movie thinking it was going to be a teenage actress trying to find a way to form a friendship/relationship with the boy next door who mostly knows her screen image.

That's not what this is, though there's a bit of it; instead, it's about Ji-eun being exiled to a mental landscape based upon the spot in the middle of nowhere where her abuse took place It's got all the pieces that go with that, from the taunting internal dialog to the enabling mother, to ultimately deciding to assert oneself, and for the most part done pretty well. Writer/director Lee Chan-bee does a very nice job finding the details that drive certain points home, particularly how there's this sexualization of teenage girls that's not entirely imposed by older men even as it often caters to them, and how Ji-eun's mental prison is abstracted but not cool in any way: It's empty and undeveloped and the sort of thing a city girl like a young actress would find boring.


"Ijen jugeosseumyeon jokenne" ("Wish You Were Dead")

☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Lee Min-hyuk and co-writer Park Kyu-eun know how to make a good short film: They kick off with a neat premise that has some resonance, kick off in media res, and build a lot of beats around jumping straight to the result of a bad move rather than playing out the bits that are going to require a lot of tricky effects work. You could probably build a feature around a funeral for the controlling patriarch that has him coming back as a zombie and continuing to destroy the family after his death, but this really reduces it to its essentials.

It's got a lot of neat little bits in it, as well: The fact that the male heirs who can deliver offspring are privileged feels annoying and arbitrary as a zombie-movie rule (down to Seo-hyun's father being vulnerable in the way her brother isn't because Dad's had a vasectomy), but it's also annoying and arbitrary in everyday life; Seo-hyun taking a Go board and using it to try and plot an exit - visually, it's a sort of Go/Clue hybrid - is fun improvisation. And Park Seo-yoon is sneakily great as Seo-hyun in part because, while she's clearly the smartest member of the clan and the one with the best chance of figuring out an exit and probably running the family business afterward, there's something a bit unsympathetic about her, like she's not that upset that the family members who treated her as less important than her dimwit brother and cowardly father are being murdered as they try to execute her plans. This isn't a woman who needs to prove herself to her family so much as one whose potential doesn't have to be linked to their approval.

There's a pretty good path to a longer feature if director Lee wants it, and I suspect a feature would look a bit different from the short, which is why this film is worth twenty minutes whether it leads to something bigger or not.


"TROPIC"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Anything can be a metaphor if you work at it enough, such as an aloha shirt, which reminds Choi Sun (Bae Min-su) of both how her sister Seou (Kim Da-a) committed suicide and how she really wanted to get to a happier, more carefree place, even if neither she nor Sun could make it happen. It kind of suggests the Swamp Thing-looking monster and headspace that Sun finds herself in as writer/director Park Jung-yoon bounces her between the present and the past, her two young actresses playing two people with no-one closer even though being together isn't easy.

I really love how Park ends the movie, with Sun wearing a shirt that is clearly faded, either from far too much detergent or repeated washings. That's probably how you have to remember a loved one who has ended her life like that, and it's a nice visual for how Sun will keep as much of Seou with her as she can, even if she can only handle part of her.


Wara Nimo Sugaru Kemonotachi (Beasts Clutching at Straws)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream the Korean version (Prime link for Korean version), or buy the disc for the Korean version at Amazon

I must admit to being curious about both previous iterations of this story: I recall the Korean film from 2020 being entertaining but also being kind of a miserable viewing experience (the festival streaming platform used in 2020 was terrible), and there are just enough differences between the two movies to make me wonder if this Japanese adaptation of a Japanese novel is closer. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an official English translation - more mysteries and thrillers from that country are crossing the Pacific than ever before but there are so many! - but both adaptations being pretty good suggests good things about the source material.

It starts with Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), who doesn't seem like much of a "beast"; he's trying to make it as a Vtuber without really having a hook as he works in an internet cafe with private booths and looks after his grandmother with severe dementia in the apartment above her late husband's shuttered barbershop. Things potentially change when a guy who rushed out without paying his bill leaves behind a bag of money. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Ryosuke Ebato (Hiroki Narmiya), a corrupt cop deep in debt to the Goda syndicate, has a line on a college regent who has defrauded his employer. Is that the man who dropped the bag at the internet cafe, or the one who recently started visiting sex worker Mina, who has made a new friend in femme fatale Maria. Speaking of Maria, she seems to know the drill a bit too well when Mina needs to dispose of her abusive husband's body.

There's a twist or two to this, of course, which isn't completely surprising when you get to it, although to be fair I may have had the Korean version in mind when it happened. One thing director/co-wirter Hideo Jojo does fairly well is keep Kanji just busy enough, considering that most of the other threads are more obviously connected. They're not going to collide for a while, but his various frustrations at home are worth watching and entertaining for being darkly comic in a different way than the folks less innocently connected to various crimes. It means the tone doesn't really cause whiplash but the audience doesn't get completely mired in the pure cynicism of backstabbing and threats elsewhere, and there's just enough of that lurking around the edges that it doesn't feel completely separate.

It doesn't hurt that there's a nice supporting cast of characters around the main folks; Kanji's got a cute co-worker who might be a potential partner but doesn't have to be, and his grandmother is out of it in a way that plays as chaos comedy from a remove but which is also a pure nightmare from up close. Ebato's often paired with a driver who seems to haplessly wind up deeper than he intends because he (perhaps unwisely) considers Ebato a friend and a new partner investigating the very fraud he's trying to cover up, with the Goda chief having a hulking and horrifically eccentric good on hand. Mina's got an avid younger client, and Maria's lone-wolf status is fitting but things also lock in when her other connections are revealed. It's not a huge, messy ensemble, but it's one where the "hubs" are very solid indeed and none of the folks in their orbit are entirely one-note jokes.

There's also something very pleasant about how Jojo and company often seem to have come out on the other side of trying to chase the kind of cool that many were after with their intersecting crime narratives in the wake of Pulp Fiction - Kanji's streaming is small-time enough to be kind of pathetic, and everyone bit Maria is more dork than badass, with Maria explicitly pretty awful. The repetition of a zipper splitting a black screen as a scene transition renders it cute rather than too-clever, and there's fun knowing chaos to how the opening gag is used later.

It's always an odd experience to catch a remake of something after just long enough that the original isn't fresh in one's mind and not know whether good surprises are legit or differences and need bits are not quite pulled off versus vaguely remembered. I'm leaving towards this basically being well done, a chaotic but generally fun caper.


"Best Friends with the Devil"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Hugo de Sousa comes up with a neat idea for a short here that's really well-positioned between innocent mayhem and something sinister, as Lola (Ellyn Jameson), worried about the disappearance of her friend Amy (Kailee McGee), files a missing person report and follows her trail to David (de Sousa), the last person to see her on a hike. Maybe not wise on the face of it, but when you're starting from the premise of "unfortunate accident" rather than "foul play", not indefensible!

I like how de Sousa plays this both as writer/director and actor, not really tilting the tone into obvious danger but also recognizing that the world can be especially dangerous for women on their own and letting the audience see various red flags without actually waving them in one's face. He gives out new information in ways that recognize that this is a short and maybe shouldn't be too vague for too long, forcing the viewer to really evaluate the situation without it being a slow-down/nod-sagely beat. The end's a mess, but it's a mess from how things started out.

I also always dig when a concussion is an actual big deal.


Penny Lane Is Dead

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

You've got to hand it to writer-director Mia Kate Russell for the title "Penny Lane Is Dead", because when you stand back a bit and look at the movie, it's not necessarily terribly different from others like it, but centering the title character like that sure makes the movie feel like people don't fit into the roles they're supposed to. The movie delivers impressive blood, guts, and women in peril, but feels a lot more off-center than it might.

It starts by introducing us to Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a pretty blonde with a nice family who just graduated after being accepted into a good school and who genuinely seems to acknowledge and enjoy her good fortune without trying to exploit it. She's heading out to her grandparent's cabin for a girls' weekend with her best friends: Toni (Tahlee Fereday), a tall and sporty girl whom the Lanes took in when her own parents couldn't handle her coming out as gay, and Amy (Alexandra Jensen), mousy and maybe autistic, which is probably not something you'd use to describe an Australian girl in 1986. Not invited is Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny's cousin and a constant source of drama, but she shows up anyway, with drugged cupcakes and her boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) not far behind. Angus is a bad'un, the son of a crime boss, and has two goons in tow, with Merrick (Fletcher Humphrys) and old pro who would rather deliver the drugs they have with no fuss but Rodowsky (Steve Le Marquand), like Angus, more inclined to have a little fun with Kat's cousin and her friends, whether they want it or not.

Penny's the title character and Toni's the conventional protagonist, but the movie's center of gravity is Kat, who kind of fascinates in that she's clearly a monster from the word go, but Russell and actress Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn seem to have a pretty good handle on how girls like her get like that. There's not a moment when the movie stops and she explains her sad origin story, but every time Russell finds a way to remind the attackers (and the audience) that these sexy young girls are 17 or 18, you can't help but remember that this applies to Kat as well as Penny, and she's an outcast for what she did as a teenager. Wright dives into the role with abandon, fully committed to Kat's awfulness, but there's always a streak of desperate need to her bad behavior and skimpy outfits, and there are moments when Angus treats Kat terribly and it's very clear she knows this and one wonders if this might be the time she wobbles.

It's a great performance, but doesn't push the rest off the screen; the girls especially are a strong ensemble. Tahlee Fereday and Bailey Spalding are impressive as Toni & Penny; there are early scenes where they discuss the possibility of being more than friends and while they're maybe a bit nervous about letting Amy or Penny's parents in on this, they're both likably confident in who they are and trusting in each other, even if Toni's future isn't quite so certain as Penny's seems to be. Alexandra Jensen's Amy isn't the same - she's seventeen and carries an emotional support stuffie around - but I really like how Jensen doesn't play Amy as a collection of tics and nervousness; she seems to take a second to think before speaking even if she misjudges her words. On the boys' side, Ben O'Toole is entitlement unleashed as Angus, ninety percent repugnant but with the sort of self-assurance that one can see why he might be kind of appealing to someone like Kat or go unquestioned by someone like Fletcher Humphys's Rodowsky who doesn't allow any sympathy into how he helps himself to Angus's scraps. Steve Le Marquand does really well with one of my favorite archetypes, the unrepentant criminal who nevertheless wants to be friggin' professional both for what he tells himself and because leaving a bunch of corpses around is bad for business.

And there will be corpses; it's a pretty gnarly movie where folks are likely to get maimed before being outright killed, and Russell is adept at using that to both make Angus & Kat seem more vicious and Toni's wins more satisfying. The gore team is on point throughout but Russell doesn't entirely lean on them to make the movie work: She doesn't exactly do a slow build but she tends to add momentum more than stopping for a breather, and she's crucially aware that Penny unconscious or dazed is going to create a lot more tension that the audience can grasp than various nasty injuries that much of the audience is going to read as "fun" special effects, and she's good at making sure there's really nothing sexy about it without making things more outwardly grotesque.

Indeed, I think what's kind of exciting about Penny Lane Is Dead and makes it feel noteworthy more than the setting or the quality of the gore is how the screenplay seems to reflect all the toxic forces at work in good balance: It is absolutely older guys preying on younger girls and even the surfer dudes at the local shop who are basically unproblematic don't serve as a "not all men" counterweight to that, but the engine that drives much of the violence is the jealousy and resentment among young women that is its own real thing even if Penny and her friends are great and casually supportive. Russell doesn't exactly bend things toward a definitive statement here, but she mixes these various impulses together in ways that give the movie a ring of truth even though it is, also, a revenge thriller with a ton of bloody action. It's good stuff, apt to satisfy the gorehounds but play like a real movie to those who want more.

Asian Imports: My Daughter Is a Zombie and The Lychee Road

Back from Montreal, back on this nonsense:

Both are apparently leaving Boston after Thursday (and those are early/late shows), though The Lychee Road had a pretty good three-week run; I was kind of worried I might have to find a window while in Montreal, where it was playing at the Forum. They're being displaced by another big Chinese movie (Dead to Rights) and some others from elsewhere in Asia - the Shin Godzilla rerelease and War 2 & Coolie from India.

It always amuses me that, when I get back from Fantasia, there are a couple of films that would have been right at home there which I kind of have to scramble to see, but it's mostly because those movies have a higher churn rate than a lot of multiplex material all year round.


My Daughter Is a Zombie

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

As far as I can tell, My Daughter Is a Zombie has no connection to My Neighbor Zombie, one of my favorite movies in the genre that also happens to come from South Korea, but I like it for one of the same reasons I liked the other: The filmmakers steadfastly refuse to approve of solving a health-care crisis with guns, which even the most well-intentioned folks in other zombie movies find hard to resist.

The film opens with Lee Jeong-hwan (Jo Jung-suk), a former zookeeper and large animal trainer, returning to his family home in the quaint village of Eunbag-Ri to greet his daughter Su-ah (Choi Yu-ri) - who, we are soon shown and informed, is likely South Korea's last zombie. Like most 15-year-old girls, she found her father kind of cringey and annoying, even if she did share his love of dance, but got bitten while they fled Seoul during the zombie outbreak. She had turned by the time they got to Eunbag-Ri, but neither her father, grandmother Kim Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun), nor Jeong-hwan's old friend Cho Dong-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho) had it in them to put her down. What they soon discovered was that apparently infectees like Su-ah respond to reminders of their old lives, so they do all they can to help Su-ah resist her new feral instincts. Not eager to help, on the other hand, is Shin Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), Jeong-hwan's first love, the local schoolteacher, and, after having to put down her own finacé, the region's top zombie-hunter.

I don't know how many Webtoon-derived movies I've seen, but this feels like the most Webtoon-derived a movie can be. There's an episodic structure that seems built to never really end but also never leave you completely hanging if it were to stop, a cat that is just expressive enough to need to be CGI. That isn't a dig, necessarily, but it kind of feels 90% premise, 10% plot, committed to the idea of this but kind of content to meander and not worrying about filling in some gaps. It's all right by that, though; the filmmakers capture how comics designed for infinite scroll have a sort of soothing rhythm even when the events are tense, and translate transitions and style to live action well. I'm reasonably sure the caricaturist at an amusement park is the original artist, which would be cute.

It's got a pleasant enough cast playing characters you're seldom sorry to see on screen, too: The adults are affable and funny while still tending to carry a little bit of the tension that naturally comes with hiding Su-ah, with Cho Jung-seok tending to look more committed as the movie goes on and more backstory is revealed, while Lee Jung-eun gives depth to the alcoholic granny that would typically be a comic character and Cho Yeo-jeong sees how a potential threat can be funny. I like Choi Yu-ri's Su-ah enough to wish we saw most of her as just a regular kid, although I kind of suspect that the pantomime she does as a zombie is kind of difficult to pull off well. The script says the word "zombie" throughout but doesn't treat Romero rules as necessarily definitive (indeed, the entire idea is arguably that they're made to force people to act cruelly rather than question cruelty). The filmmakers are pretty good at balancing cute absurdity and danger.

Maybe not enough; there's a lot that seems really ill-advised beyond what we might be willing to forgive, and less soul searching afterward than seems warranted. The story maps just well enough onto caring for, say, a child with cognitive issues that the places where it doesn't feel a bit uncomfortable (I wonder how it would hit if the girl's father was "teaching" instead of "training" her). And, boy, it wants to have all the endings, both introducing a new threat and including a gigantic "oh, by the way" bit.R />
Is it a bit odd for a zombie movie to ultimately be described as "pleasant"? Maybe, and there are certainly times when it doesn't seem to be the best of ideas, but it's not a bad idea to take this approach every once in a while.


Chang'an De Li Zhi (The Lychee Road)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The trick of a movie like The Lychee Road, I think, is figuring out how to maintain the odd spirit of the start, where you've got room to be kind of goofy setting things up and making jokes that are either anachronistic or about how certain things haven't changed to make the Tang Dynasty relatable to a moder audience, into the finale, when the stakes are immediate, the story is maybe catching up to recorded history, and there's a lesson you want to teach. Da Peng is better at the modern and chaotic than period adventure and dreams, so this movie slides out of his wheelhouse as that goes on.

He plays Li Shande, who came to the capital at 24 with the desire to be a dedicated public servant, and twenty-odd years later "Old Li" is well-liked by his co-workers in the Department of Imperial Granaries but still a broke ninth-level administrator (he's much better at math than politics), taking out an expensive loan to buy a home on the very outskirts for his sharp-tempered wife A-tong (Zhuang Dafei) and young daughter (Yang Huanyu). But it gets worse: The Emperor has decreed that fresh lychees from Lingnan will be served at his wife's birthday celebration on June 1st, 117 days away, but lychees spoil in three or four days, far faster than any route between the cities. Scheming Eunuch Du Shaoling (Zhang Ruoyun) advises the head of the Granaries, Liu Shuling (Wang Xun), to find a sap to appoint as Lychee envoy and take the fall, along with the expected death sentence for failing the Emperor. That'd be Old Li. It takes him 30 days to reach Lingnan and would likely take just as long to return. Ambitious merchant Su Liang (Bai "White-K" Ke), a second son looking to escape his brother's shadow, offers to buy the pass that will let Li bypass tolls and customs to live out the next three months in comfort, but after meeting Su and Zheng Yuting (Yang Mi), the young owner of the local orchards, he begins to think there may be a way to pull it off.

Longtime fans of co-writer/director/star Dong "Da Peng" Chengpeng, whose movies have fairly reliably opened in North America on top of being big hits in China, should feel at home in the first section; Li is more nerd than hustler, but he's both pretty funny and a guy audiences can relate to amid the slapstick chaos and broad comedy, a lot of it along the lines of "folks in Tang Dynasty Chang'an had to pay mortgages and deal with monstrous bosses too!", and even in this sort of period piece, it's the sort of comedy Da Peng is good at, both as a filmmaker and an actor. There's delights in the middle, too, as Li sets out to handle a mission where he's been set up to fail by using the scientific method and experimenting with logistics, along with making friends with the people he'll need to help rather than ring to trick them. It's a neat balance of problem-solving and not getting too far into the weeds, and sort of feels like a bridge between the light satire of the first act and a finale which needs to be believable in Tang Dynasty terms. There's lots of chuckling about pigeons being Imperial email and wondering if stickers were really a thing in that time.

Even before the finale throws a bunch of epilogues one's way, though, the shift to something more melodramatic feels a bit off, especially if one thinks Li Shinde would be more conscious of where his new plan was heading. The scheming suddenly seems too immediate compared to the rest of the movie, and too abstract. Sure, the truth of the matter is that Li's fate is largely in the hands of nobles and bureaucrats who barely regard him as human while he's in the room with them, and not even that once he leaves, but even with the occasional cuts back to Chang'an, it's hard to get invested in the scheming over who will lose face if Li succeeds (and is willing to kill over it) versus those who think they can derive advantage when the sort of logistics problems Li has to solve on the fly are what has been driving interest so far. There's also a speech which seems a little too intent on reflecting good socialist values, maybe to counter how Su Liang and Zheng Yuting aren't portrayed in a bad light for being businesspeople seeking advantages, but we've all got folks who need to hear it, whether we're in China or the United States.

It is, at least, an extremely watchable cast that Da Peng surrounds himself with: Zhuang Dafei gets introduced as something of a harpy who mostly slaps people, but by the end one can see a marriage that works. White-K and Yang Mi lubricate the center of the movie in different ways and always feel like they've got a life outside this particular story. When you need to raise the stakes in the end, you can do a lot worse than bringing in Andy Lau Tak-wah as an imperial advisor who seems malevolent even when being helpful.

I'm not sure it necessarily adds up to a crowd pleaser, though it's done fairly well in its native land and stuck around here longer than usual. There are bits throughout the movie to enjoy, at least, even if it as a whole never gets the heights of the filmmaker's best, zaniest work.

Fantasia 2022.02: Coupez! and Hard Boiled

Welcome to the last non-marathon day of the festival! From here out, it's long days and falling behind on the blog.

Friday was a day of tough-ish decisions, with both My Small Land and Swallowed in de Seve not exactly having ideal second showtimes on Monday, while the big shows in Hall were things that were pretty familiar - I'd seen the movie Coupez! remakes in the very same room, and for all I know a few of us watched the very same print of Hard Boiled at Hong-Kong-a-Thon Part III just three months ago. But, hey, Michel Hazanavicius made The Artist (and also something called Le Redoutable I haven't seen), so he knows his meta-movies. And Hard Boiled had a top-tier special guest.

Mr. John Woo Yu-Sen everybody, looking a little worn down - he recently had a fall, which was why he was using a cane and letting his daughter help him around - but seeming very sincerely happy for the honor, and seemed reasonably sincere as he talked about finding Montreal a delightful city where he would like to make one of his next movies (you've got to say that, I suppose, but also it is). Fifteen years in Hollywood means he was able to conduct the entire event in English, with a bit of effort.

He comes across as a charming gentleman who can also be a complete maniac, talking about how he loves working with stuntpeople because they are great problem solvers who just dive into getting a filmmaker what he needs, but then he'll also just casually tell a story about how the flames from one of the explosions at the end of this movie were "so beautiful" that he pushed a cameraman to cover himself with a wet towel and run into them. He also talked a lot about how Hard Boiled came from a place of anger - Hong Kong was seeing a crime wave at the time and he wanted to create this iconic hero cop in Chow Yun-Fat's "Tequila", rushing into gunfire and saving babies.

As I was in the second row, he actually wound up sitting directly in front of me for the start and the end of the movie, although he left for the bulk of it; it must be an odd thing to watch something where you've got all these memories of spending weeks on set organizing and putting things together while everyone around you is experiencing real-time exhilaration.

As for the future, he mentioned that he has no plans to return to Hong Kong or China, saying that Hong Kong only wants him to make gangster films and China has too many restrictions on what you can do. He'd like to work with Chow Yun-fat again, although it can be hard to arrange. Truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised if both were on very-dark-gray lists back home, Woo for making The Crossing about people going to Taiwan and Chow for expressing some sympathy for the umbrella protests. He doesn't seem to mind that, though, looking forward to making films in different places around the world and trying to give them some local flavor - Manhunt was made in Japan and the forthcoming Silent Night takes place in Mexico, and in addition to his comments about wanting to make a film in Montreal, he said he'd love to do something in France.

Anyway, if you're up here, he's got a master class this afternoon and will be around for the screening of Face/Off on Sunday. My plans today include Baby Assassins, The Fish Tale, Popran, One and Four, and Mercenaries from Hong Kong, if I'm not totally run down by midnight.

Coupez! (aka Z as in Z, Final Cut)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Japanese film One Cut of the Dead was a magic trick, but the sort that is built around revealing the gimmick, and as a result I was reluctant to see how well it worked the second time through, whether that meant rewatching the original or a remake. The good news is that the filmmakers know they've got audiences with very different sets of expectations coming in, and I think they do okay satisfying both.

It starts in the same way as the original - leaping into the last act of a zombie movie, only for the director (Romain Duris) to yell "cut!" and berate his actors (Finnegan Oldfield & Matilda Lutz) for not giving the performance the film needs. They get sympathy from the make-up artist (Bérénice Bejo), but things go awry when it becomes clear that there are real zombies on the set. And then we jump back to see how everyone got to that spot…

For those who have seen One Cut, I suspect the opening act is actually a little better here - you can see that it's a strong cast right away and enjoy their chemistry, rather than just sort of groan at how this film-within-a-film is kind of excruciating. On the other hand, all the French characters with Japanese names gives away that something is up early on, which means that the turnarounds later are not the same sort of jolting revelations. The second act also feels a little stronger, although writer/director Michel Hazanavicius seems to have a little trouble getting his entire ensemble enough to do. It's a simple enough story at the heart, but there are some moments where things are paying off in the end that don't quite seem set up.

How does it play for newcomers? No idea but I figure it works okay. It's got the same surprisingly upbeat heart as its predecessor, the cast is pretty dang good. Romain Duris is thoroughly charming as the working TV director known for "fast, cheap, and decent", playing the character as less reserved than his Japanese equivalent but still able to get across what's driving him. Finnegan Oldfield is a standout among the secondary characters for how he connects the actor and the part in different acts of the movie. But ultimately, this film works on how well the third act builds upon everything else, and the series of coins dropping certainly got good reactions from the crowd.

Duris's Rémi mentions that you need to do some localization in movies like this, and there's a bit of a fight between doing it well and slavish faithfulness to the source. It's not always on the right side of the line, but lands there more often than not.

Lat sau san taam (Hard Boiled)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, 35mm)

As mentioned above, I just saw this a few months ago, and liked it, but I've got to confess, I tend to get lost at various points. I love the broad, operatic strokes of the story, but don't get terribly excited about the details, and can sort of find myself following along in a fog until that absolutely fantastic, crazy finale.

Small review from 2007.

Fantasia/New York Asian Film Festivals 2021.00-01: Kratt, Not Quite Dead Yet, Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, and Brain Freeze

In a typical year, I'm taking a bunch of time off work and heading up to Montreal for most of July, which means that going down to New York for a weekend beforehand is kind of hard to justify, although that hasn't stopped me in the past. Last year was weird not just because both were virtual, but the rescheduling had Fantasia up first, and both kind of tricky to deal with: For Fantasia, it was mostly my fault, as I've by and large been able to avoid dealing with screeners, so I didn't know how to work the library; NYAFF had a weird system for paying customers where I had to stream to my phone and then echo that to the Roku and TV.

Both look a lot more manageable this year, so hopefully I won't run into any situations where I'm waiting to watch something. Fantasia's got a library of stuff that doesn't require sending a bunch of emails that might not get answered, NYAFF looks to be using a much less frustrating system, and I'll probably using any time actually on-site for catch-up if I travel to New York (which I'm planning on, but then again, I haven't actually purchased any tickets/transport/lodging). There's also a few discs on order from Hong Kong that should be shipping out right about now and will likely make it to my door before the festivals are over.

Although, funny story, I am reasonably sure I saw Not Quite Dead Yet available for pre-order on DDDHouse a couple months back, but didn't bite, which is a shame - it's a fun movie that I would like to watch again, especially considering that the screener was a scope-width picture inside an Academy-Ratio frame, to which my Roku added blank space on the sides when outputting to my 4K TV, meaning it took up something like 42% of my screen and that's before you get to the big ol' watermark. It's a genuinely goofy way to show critics the film if you want their reviews to say anything about the film's visual elements, but then, the niche audience for this sort of thing might be small enough that even a little piracy could destroy your market. Anyway, you as a reader probably don't care about this unless you're really into knowing why I don't talk more about composition and cinematography in some cases, but the funny part is I can't find any trace of this having been available to order. Maybe the HK disc was cancelled, maybe they just cleaned the DB of stuff that sold out, but I'm sure it was there and now it's not.

Anyway, here's some movies maybe worth streaming if you're north of the border, as NYAFF doesn't start until Friday, when those of us in the U.S. get to join the fun.

Kratt

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

One of my favorite Fantasia discoveries in recent years is November, a stark black-and-white fantasy whose willingness to immerse the audience in the world of Estonian folklore made it both more bizarre and grounded, with the obsessive automatons known as "kratts" particularly memorable. Rasmus Merivoo transplants a fair amount of that mythology to the present in his movie Kratt, but rooting it in such a contemporary setting winds up muting what makes this particular demon interesting and timeless.

The film opens with a flashback to 1895, the last time someone in this small Estonian town built a kratt - that is, a demonically-animated automaton with an endless appetite for work that will turn on its creator should it fall idle. In the present, siblings Mia (Nora Merivoo) and Kevin (Harri Merivoo) are dropped off at the home of their grandmother Helju (Mari Lill) while their parents go on some sort of retreat, without phones but with chores, which Mia especially finds unreasonable. They meet local twins Juuli (Elise Tekko) and August (Roland Teima) and eventually wind up at the library where they discover a book with a pentagram moved from the governor's mansion, whose embattled resident (Ivo Uukkivi) is desperately trying to hang on to power by trying to play to both a developer trying to cut down an ancestral grove and the locals (led by the twins' father) aiming to preserve it.

There are moments where one can see very clearly where the filmmaker might have had the idea to do a movie about trying to conjure work out of thin air beyond grumbling that kids weren't so lazy back in his day, although that framing does make his casting his own children as the main characters even more amusing ("oh, you want to just screw around on your phones all summer? Fat chance, we're going to spend a month making a movie about why you shouldn't!"). Everyone but the grandmother seems to be looking for shortcuts, from Val with her chores, their parents apparently trying to fix their relationship in a couple of weeks, the politician who wants to stay in power without really accomplishing anything versus just showing up and saying something that sounds good - which, to be fair, is about the level of effort the protesters want to put in. There's an especially clever bit later on where Merivoo follows a question asked of a Siri knock-off to the mechanical turk behind it.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Ichido shinde mita (Not Quite Dead Yet)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Vimeo)

As odd as watching young actors grow up and change the directions of their careers can be, it's all the more so when one just gets the bits and pieces of their career that make it abroad to festivals. Take Suzu Hirose, whom most English-speaking audiences likely first noted in Our Little Sister and mostly saw as a solid part of other dramas by renowned filmmakers, but has spent her teens and early twenties working in Japanese film and TV almost non-stop, across a variety of dramas. So it's a bit surprising to see her starring in something as zany as Not Quite Dead Yet, although maybe not that she dives in and makes it work.

She plays Nanase Nobata, the daughter of pharma company founder Kei (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi) who just graduated college with a degree in pharmacology but only shows up at the job interview expected to be a mere formality to say there's no way in hell she'll work in the family business after it kept him away when mother Yuriko (Tae Kimura) died. Instead, she goes to a gig of her death metal band Soulzz, shadowed as always by Kei's exceptionally unobtrusive employee Taku "Ghost" Matsuoka (Ryo Yoshizawa). While that's happening, her father takes a "two-day death" pill to help flush out the mole feeding information to rival Tanabe (Kyusaku Shimada), except that it's Watanabe (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), the guy who sold him on this plan and who means to pressure Nanase into selling the company. Of course, he didn't see Ghost in the room while he gave Kei the pill, or know that Nanase can see and smell (but not hear) her father's ghost, meaning he's got a lot of skullduggery to do before Kei comes back to life on Christmas.

That sounds like something frantic, but it's really not; writer Yoshimitusu Sawamoto and director Shinji Hamasaki are smart about how they use their two-day deadline to give Nanase and Ghost (and Kei from beyond) just enough enough time to try and thwart Watanabe and Tanabe without having to pour every second of that time into it, so they can vent and fill the time when they're waiting for something to finish with wavering and flashbacks, because Nanase is genuinely irate. It's a pace that never lets the viewer's mind wander, even when bits start to repeat, but does give the filmmakers time to poke around in odd corners and let character bits play out enough that someone can pop up later and have a joke land.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break

* * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

There's a weird desperation to the back half of Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, like the filmmakers are desperate to make the audience invest in the pursuit and violence of what's going on because they are acutely aware that they squandered the first half-hour of the movie and need to catch up if they're going to make the points they intend. Not that those are particularly interesting or novel points; a story about a delusional social-media addict/would-be entertainer needs to be more interesting than this to stand out.

And that's what Paul Dood (Tom Meeten) is, well into his forties but still dreaming of show business success; he's currently using livestreaming site "TrendLadder" as an outlet but very far down the ladder in terms of viewers, and for every person who watches him sincerely like his co-worker Clemmie (Katherine Parkinson), there is probably at least one more watching to mock him like Bruce (Jarred Christmas). His mother Julie (June Watson) - elderly, ailing, and in a bit of a fog - supports him unreservedly, so it's important she go with him to the TrendLadder Talent Show audition hosted by Jack Tapp. A series of setbacks from unkind people has the day end as badly as it can, and soon Paul is planning a livestream that will really get him noticed - the one where he takes his revenge.

There are many, many worse premises for a dark comedy than "middle-aged theater kid goes on a rampage", but even something with that potential demands to be set up with a little more care than this manages. Paul and Julie aren't given any sort of backstory at all, and while they don't need to have some sort of unique situation that has kept them down, anything to make them less generic could have helped, even the slightest personality quirk. Even if Paul is meant to be some sort of everyman despite his discount-rack flamboyance, the crawl to the audition is just brutal viewing, something like a half hour going for dry and acerbic but instead winding up mostly dull, with even the meanness not packing any zip after the first first jerk the Doods encounter. Some of the situations also make Paul feel frustratingly stupid; while he's not supposed to be particularly clever, it's not unreasonable to yell something along the lines of "just walk out of that extended sketch about an absurd tea-house rather than just leaving your wheelchair-bound mother on the street! If this place exists, there must be a shop where you can buy a bottle of water nearby!"

Full review at eFilmCritic

Satoshi Kon, l'illusionniste (Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist) * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

It's a crying shame that Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist can be both relatively detailed and complete as an overview of Kon's career; when pancreatic cancer claimed him in 2010, he was only 46, with four animated features, one mini-series, and a handful of shorter works in anime and manga to his name. Nevertheless, this festival's award for excellence in animation bears his name for good reason, and this documentary profile does a fine job of showing why he is so revered.

His relatively short career means that it can be broken up into sections focusing on his works: Perfect Blue, a psychological thriller whose grounded and adult nature was unlike much Japanese animation that had previously crossed the Pacific; Millennium Actress, which story that spans Japan's Twentieth Century inspired by the life of actress Setsuko Hara; Tokyo Godfathers, a freewheeling adventure among the unseen people of the metropolis; Paranoia Agent, a TV series where chaos takes human form and anything can happen; Paprika, a science-fiction thriller that pulled his themes on multiple identities and the nature of reality together; and the unfinished Dreaming Machine, intended to be his first family-friendly adventure story. Director Pascal-Alex Vincent is able to excerpt all of these works liberally (except the last, where he mostly has concept art), allowing the audience to see the extent to which Kon brought a realistic style to his films while still being able to explode into fantasy and heightened emotion, and see how themes recur in his work.

Kon himself obviously cannot be interviewed, but Vincent is able to put together an impressive group of people to talk about his work. There are noteworthy Western filmmakers who were at points aiming to adapt his work like Marc Caro and Darren Aranofsky, with the latter being frank about why his live-action Perfect Blue never came together even though he was able to homage the original in Requiem for a Dream; there are fellow anime directors like legend Mamoru Oshii and Mamoru Hosada. Novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, a legend of Japanese science fiction, comes across as aware of his own status but generous in how Kon adapted his work; there's a nice bit of serendipity in how as Kon was making his last film Paprika, Hosada was making his first feature from another Tsutsui work, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The most interesting and entertaining interviews come from those who worked with him, whether it be Junko Iwao talking about drawing on her own experience as an idol singer to voice Mima in Perfect Blue, Madhouse Studios founder Masao Maruyama and producer Taro Maki showing clear admiration but also clearly focused on the business side, or gregarious animator Aya Suzuki talking about her difficulties with how Kon treated his female characters.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Brain Freeze)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Vimeo)

I wish I were able to travel to Montréal to see what folks think about this one - though I'm sure the local filmmakers will get a warm welcome, how will those who always liked zombie-movie tropes feel about them as they are tentatively coming out of the Covid era, especially since this one occasionally feels like it's got both pre- and post-pandemic elements and is as such a bit off. Of course, what makes it as much fun as it is comes from a cock-eyed perspective that's both local-to-Montréal and more universal.

It takes place, by and large, on "Peacock Island'', one of the smaller isles off Île de Montréal that has more or less been developed into a gated community, most notable for a golf course whose fertilizer - developed by "Biotech M" - allows grass to grow and melt the snow even during a cold Montréal winter. Dan Gingras (Roy Dupuis) does security patrols even as he listens to a talk radio host (Simon-Olivier Fecteau) who rails against the "elites" living there, while daughter Patricia (Marianne Fortier) works at the country club. As some of the fertilizer starts to make it into the water supply, teenager André (Iani Bédard) - the sort whose nose is always in his phone - is frantically calling mother Josée (Anne-Élisabeth Bossé) because baby sister Annie's nanny Camila (Claudia Ferri) hasn't arrived, and Josée arrives home just as things are starting to go to hell.

I'm mildly curious about when Brain Freeze filmed, because it often has the hallmarks of things shot while everybody was trying to maintain distance without specifically taking place in 2020, where most scenes are a little less crowded than seems right, to the point where you only get a proper horde or dogpile once or twice and the radio studio feels a bit more like an underground bunker than the city's top station. Still, if that occasionally seems not quite right, it does so in a way that says something about how the well-off can build themselves comfortable cocoons in comparison to Dan's apartment. It may just be limited resources, of course, although I also wonder if Dan went from being a certain stock zombie-movie character - the paranoid doomsday prepper who is ironically well-prepared - to a more generous father figure once filmmakers saw the old trope wouldn't play as well, or if that was just always part of the story.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula

Hell of a week to reopen theaters with a movie about a highly transmissible contagion, huh? Who wants this right now, and would go to a theater for it?

Me, apparently. I'll readily admit it's not the world's greatest idea, and probably pure selfishness and foolishness on my part. Sure, I may tell myself that I've mitigated the risk a fair amount - I bought a ticket for a mid-week matinee in the multiplex's largest theater, and because I got there too late to even think of getting snacks, I didn't take my mask off at any point. I didn't see any of the other nine or ten people in the Imax room with concessions either, so I presume they stayed masked (I was toward the front, so I didn't see them other than coming in and out). It looks like I might have been the only non-Korean person in the theater, and make what you will of that.

Is that enough to make going to the movies "safe"? Probably not, and feeling like one has earned a couple hours of extra risk after having been pretty good for the past few months is the way we get back in a worse situation. I can say that I'm creating less danger than others - I live alone and work from home, with no reason to go out for the next week - but I won't lie, those facts make me worry a bit more about what happens if I do get sick and I'm dizzy and wiped out for a month or three. In some ways, that's the scariest outcome.

The funny thing is, I never felt particularly on-edge during the movie. The subway ride from Porter to Park, though? That was kind of nerve-wracking, especially as more people started getting on somewhere around Central. Heck, just waiting on the platform at Porter, I instinctively stood where the fan was creating a nice breeze for a second before thinking it maybe wasn't smart to have air being blown directly in my face. It's kind of amazing not just that I haven't been in a movie theater in five months, but I hadn't even been in a vehicle of any kind since the day after I returned from vacation and spent one day at the office mostly so that I could pick stuff up. Seriously, I went to New Zealand in early March and since then this trip to see a movie at Boston Common is the furthest I've gone in months.

If it helps, I was able to get a fair amount of other things done while I was out that I generally can't get done going no further than Porter. For instance, I wore the last pair of shoes I had out on that overseas trip to the point where I'm not entirely sure how they were staying together by now, although it's tough breaking the new pair in.

Anyway… Peninsula is a lot of fun. I see Well Go is putting it out on 4K this fall and hope it looks amazing. Is it worth a trip to the theater? Well, that's between you and your particular situation, and I can't actually recommend any other person do this. I'm constantly frustrated that America didn't lock down hard, suspending rents and mortgages and paying out some basic income, so that we could stay in and not give the virus a chance to spread. Now both small local places and big companies like AMC are having a hard time justifying staying closed but also aren't in a situation where they can operate profitably. I hate that going to the movies is a bad idea health-wise and not going to the movies is going to push them closer to being out of business. This country really shouldn't be so fragile.

Bando (Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2020 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax digital)

2016's Train to Busan was one of the most electrifying zombie movies to hit screens in years, a rare unique twist on the genre with impeccable, creative action and a pretty terrific cast. Filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho's third trip to that world (including animated prequel Seoul Station) doesn't quite have the same electricity of his previous films, but it's still a fast-moving thrill ride that deserves a better time to get some time on the big screen.

It's been four years since a saliva-spread virus caused the rapid collapse of South Korea, with Army captain Han Jeong-Seok (Gang Dong-Won) one of the last out, driving his sister's family to a boat and passing by a family whose car was broken down by the side of the road. Four years later, Jeong-Seok is an unwelcome refugee in Hong Kong, doing odd jobs for gangsters until he and brother-in-law Goo Chul-Min (Kim Do-Yoon) are made a tempting offer - the gangsters have bribed their way past the blockade to loot the country, and there's a truck with twenty million dollars just waiting to be driven to Incheon, and the four-person team can keep half if they make it. Of course, they're only thinking of the zombies, not aware of "Unit 631", a group of soldiers who have become local warlords, or wild dogs like the family headed by Min-Jung (Lee Jung-Hyun), the mother Jeong-Seok drove past four years ago.

"Zombie-movie heist" is such a great hook that I almost wish Yeon had started from that rather than just picked the getaway car up halfway; he doesn't even really take the time to lay out what skills the various members of the original crew bring to the table (at least one doesn't even get a name before becoming zombie chow). Even if it takes a while to get the full, real cast of characters assembled, though, there's something very enjoyable about having such a mission-focused situation and the epidemic having had a while to settle in; a lot of zombie movies are running off the same template that it's fun to see Yeon play with the formula and as a result break away from the most familiar variations: It's got accidentally-prescient material about immigrants from the epicenter facing prejudice from their new neighbors, kids for whom this sort of life is normal, and the possibility that determination will not necessarily give way to despair.

Of course, that determination can often be the driest part of the movie even if it comes attached to the folks who are the best at action, which is the case here - Gong Dong-Won is one of the biggest action stars in South Korea and he's at the very least a good enough screen fighter to believably blast his way through a crowd of the undead and/or rogue soldiers, but between that, he doesn't have a lot to do but look guilty and determined. Same goes for Lee Jung-Hyun as fierce mama bear Min-Jung - she moves well and you wouldn't want Lee to approach the character any other way, but their scenes are never as lively as those of the villains: Koo Gyo-Hwan's Captain Seo is unraveling as the sort of upper-class officer who is not really fit for actual combat, versus Kim Min-Jae as the sadistic Sergeant Hwang, and Kim Kyu-Baek almost sympathetic as the quartermaster running interference between them. The biggest kick comes from Min-Jung's kids, though - Lee Ye-Won brings constant energy as a seven-year-old who doesn't know that using her RC cars to distract the zombies she scans for using night-vision goggles isn't normal, even when needling her sister Joon-i (Lee Re), a somewhat sour teenager who clearly learned how to drive by playing video games.

And good for her, because if Yeon isn't quite doing "zombie heist", he's got an eye on The Fast, The Furious, and the Undead, with a last act full of car chases through abandoned streets with hordes of zombies serving as obstacles. There's a moment or two when the CGI ghouls seem especially weightless, but it's an acceptable trade-off for how much smashing and skidding Yeon and his car stunt crew go in for, delivering a high-octane finale that offers lots of grinding metal, opportunity for nasty bites, and more than a few chances for Gang Dong-Won, Lee Jung-Hyun, and Joon-i's stunt driver to show their action chops. The film has never been slow, but Yeon piles it on for the finale, and he's got the same terrific eye for how to use the screen and set a pace that he showed in the first Train to Busan.

There's not a whole lot of his early, dark animated films readily visible in Peninsula - it's sometimes hard to believe that the guy who made The King of Pigs and The Fake is the same one who made his live-action adventures - or any moment that catches the audience's breath like a couple in Train, but it's a heck of a ride despite coming out at the absolute worst time to release a movie about a country devastated by a highly-transmissible disease. Here's hoping we get another chance to see it on the big screen once things are something closer to normal.

Also at eFilmCritic