Director: Jong-ho Huh
Writers: Jeong-uk Byeon, Heo-dam
Stars: Myung-Min Kim, In-kwon Kim, Hyeri Lee
Run Time: 1 Hour, 45 Minutes
Synopsis
We start in 1506. The king has been replaced with a new king, and his officials are turning against him. The soldiers are killing those infected, or said to be infected with the plague. Credits roll.
There are reports of monster attacks on Mt. Inwangsan; a new and unseen beast. The Prime Minister says monsters appear in lands with poor leadership.
The hunters are skeptical, but something’s eating the animals. We meet the two brother-hunters and their daughter. A messenger from the king comes. It turns out her father was an important general, and her uncle was really good as well. They are retired now.
We get a flashback to the king sending the “father,” Yoon Gyeom, away with the baby girl to protect her. She was abandoned with the plague-purge from the pre-credit sequence. The uncle was sent away with him. The king explains why he sent them away, and why he needs them to return. Yoon and Sung, the brothers return to Hanyang, the capital, and Myung follows behind them.
Meanwhile, a priestess and her group try to pray away the Monstrum, but it kills them all. It’s either invisible or very fast, but we don’t see it. The general and his people investigate the bodies the next morning. A man stumbles into town saying he was attacked by the Monstrum. They find half a man hanging way up on a tree. How did he get up there? Yoon insists they were killed by a man.
Myung likes Officer Hur, and they’re about the same age. They figure out that Monstrum is spreading a plague. They get “volunteers” from the town to form a search party to find the thing in the woods. It’s a monster hunt, but it’s also very political. The old Prime Minister makes it known that he’s not happy that Yoon has returned to active duty.
They return to the pit where Yon rescued Myung many years ago, and they find a huge paw print. The soldiers turn on the villagers, killing most of them. We get a martial arts break as the battle rages. Yoon, Sung, Myung, and Hur are the only survivors, but are captured. The evil general kicks Myung and Hur down into the pit where the Monstrum lives.
The Monstrum climbs out of the put and attacks the general’s men. The question of whether or not Monstrum is real is finally answered. The men that are killed are covered in bloody boils. They meet the old man in the cave, and he tells them to cover themselves in goo so the creature can’t smell them; he has bad eyesight.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister decides to use this situation to bring down the king. He orders the Tiger Knights to burn down the city; the peasant’s rage will turn them against the king.
The old man leads Yoon and his group to Jojun Hall, where the old king used to keep his rarest beasts. The old man’s job was to feed the beast. We get a flashback to see the baby Monstrum. The old man rescued the Monstrum from the purge when the old king died. It eventually turned crazed and in pain by eating plague-infested corpses. Monstrum eats the old man.
The Prime Minister makes his move and shoots the king. His soldiers are preparing to destroy the town when Monstrum attacks the throne room. Then it attacks the courtyard. It makes a big mess out of the troops. They finally capture it, and the Prime Minister wants to release it on the town and then kill it himself for a PR stunt.
But it’s not that easy. Monstrum starts spitting plague juice on the troops and escapes. The villagers turn on the soldiers and lock the Prime Minister inside the palace with the Monstrum. The Monstrum kills the PM, climbs to the top of the palace tower and gives a King Kong roar. Yoon shoots him with an arrow, and Monstrum falls to the ground below. Meanwhile, Sung and Hur battle the evil general, but Myung ends up saving both of them.
Yoon then leads the Monstrum to an explosive trap set by Sung and Hur and sacrifices himself to blow it up. Impossibly, he survives and the four main characters all have a happy ending. We jump ahead three years to when Myung and Hur get married, and Yoon and Sung go off into the mountains again.
Commentary
This looks like it had a really big budget. It’s brightly lit, very colorful, and looks really good. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes history here, and it shows. Yes, it’s a monster film, but it takes place in a big, fleshed-out world. I have no idea how much of this is based on actual historical periods and people, but it’s very realistic.
The Monstrum itself is a pure cgi creation, but it looks really good, and before long, you’re rooting for it to kill everyone. Since most of the set are probably cgi, it blends in really well and looks a lot more realistic than most other cgi monsters.
It starts off like any other Asian martial arts film, with comedy and silliness until we get to know all the characters, but it gets very serious later on, and is actually very good.