Bangbeob: Jaechaui

Real entertainment. So much better than the work indoctrination garbage Holywood is producing nowadays.

A scaring yet a bit predictable story, that will get you hooked till the end.

The plot is cliché (early on when big pharmaceutical company is involved, you can guess where the story is going), the characters are stereotype (early on when key figures appear the first time, you are aware of who's the good, who's the bad and who's the ugly), the techniques are common and mediocre ("better than Hollywood"? Did those commentators watch action flicks more than 2 decades ago e.g. CON AIR (1997), RONIN (1998), THE MOMMY (1999)?) Even the title gives a false impression that a new Pirates of the Caribbean have came to the silver screen.

Nevertheless, THE CURSED: DEAD MAN'S PREY (2021) is a wonderful time killer. Subject matter Western audience loves, black magic not difficult to understand, eerie but not too scary, high body count but not too gory. This movie entertains, and is quite successful at that.

I had never heard about "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" (aka "The Cursed") prior to sitting down to watch it. But with it being a South Korean horror movie, of course I needed no persuasion, as I am a big fan of both Asian cinema and horror cinema. So it really didn't matter that I had never heard about the movie, and thus didn't know what I was in for.

Writers Yeon Sang-Ho and Yong-Wan Kim put together a script that sort of fell short of entertaining me. I have to admit that since I didn't understand the whole thing with the infection or curse and the crumbling corpses, then the movie just made little sense. And that made sitting through nearly two hours of this quite an ordeal.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and the actors and actresses on the cast list definitely helped to make the movie all the more watchable.

Ultimately, then "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" was not my cup of tea, and thus I wasn't particularly entertained, and finding it difficult to sit and watch it, having to feign interest in the storyline. But hey, not everything is bound to have an appeal on every viewer, and director Yong-Wan Kim failed to capture my interest here.

Visually then the movie was actually adequate. It wasn't a movie that was heavily reliant on special effects. But the CGI effects that were utilized were fair.

Now, I am sure that there is an audience out there for a supernatural thriller like "Bangbeob: Jaechaui", because it definitely wasn't a horror movie.

My rating of "Bangbeob: Jaechaui" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

I could not really get to the end of this movie. Unfortunately, though premise is high concept and clever, the pacing threw me off. The first act has a lot of fast-paced exposition, later I found out that this movie is like a sequel to a TV series in South Korea called The Cursed, one show that has mixed reviews - but don't all media have? - so I figure the exposition is to level set a lot of the preconditions for the story.

The visuals feel like a Dorama crossing with an anime, too surreal rather than horror driven, which was what I expected. The undead feel like super mutants rather than zombies, and the idea that they commit murder and every one just finds it weird rather than insane is too unimmersive.

I really liked the story! I appreciate the sincer effects. It's quite well structured. I like the characters, the narrative thread. It's nice to see it and relaxed!