- Directed by Lee Moon-young
- Written by Lee Moon-yong
- Stars Kand Byeol, Kim Dong-ho, Park Yeon-woo
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 24 Minutes
- Trailer: https://vimeo.com/830866740
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This delighted The Horror Guys. We were expecting something from the trailer and got something different. It was very good, with a lot going on. We give it a couple of strong thumbs up.
Synopsis
A young couple sits in a coffee shop, and he’s shocked at how eager she is to just get to the sex part. They’re parked in his car right in the middle of the action when his phone goes off with the most annoying ringtone ever. His friend wants to go camping. He says no, but the girl says she’s into that– camping alone with two guys. They can have sex there.
The three arrive where they plan to camp and hear gunfire in the woods. An older man, their temporary guide, meets the group, and he talks to the man with the gun on the phone. He says it’s a wild boar the other man is hunting. There’s yet another girl who goes along with them, so there are five in the car. One of the girls gets a notification on her phone that the funeral home bill for her mother is overdue, so she throws her phone out the window.
The group parks the car and walks up the side of a woodsy mountain. They walk past some bear traps, so this looks like a great place to camp. The guide drops them off at a tent and warns of the traps in the woods, but now he has to go off to a church service.
We cut to a dirty, hungry man in the same woods eating food from a dog’s bowl. He smells the meat from the camper’s grill and heads their way. One guy finds a mannequin in the woods and thinks that’s hilarious. They all talk and interact for a bit, so we get to know the four young people a little better.
The homeless-looking guy arrives in camp, and he’s got a big knife. He takes their stuff, including Chae-rim’s clothes and Ki-Young’s phone. He took all their phones. They break into the park manager’s office and find dozens of dead phones in there, along with watches and jewelry. They only have one charger, and it’s broken.
They want to walk back down the mountain, but it’s nearly dark, and there are a lot of traps out there. They try anyway, but it doesn’t take long for Jung-ho to find a trap… with his foot.
Meanwhile, Doctor Ma, the hunter with the gun, is still looking for his prey in the woods as it gets dark. Meanwhile, his prey, the guy who stole the kids’ bags, finds a Taser inside and shocks himself.
Ji-Ae tells Jung-ho her backstory with her dead family. They were killed by… a mannequin, sort of. There was a mannequin in the middle of the road, placed there by a bunch of kids who didn’t face any penalties. It turns out the kids were Ki-Young and Jung-ho. She mercy killed her own vegetative mother last week, and they’re next. She stabs them both, and Chae-rim runs off through the woods– straight into the hunter.
Before long, the hunter has all four campers locked in a room. He tries to call his boss, but there’s no answer. He’s trying to call the camp guide, who was busy at church but is now on his way there. “Doctor Ma” looks like he’s preparing for surgery. The older prisoner is still hiding in the woods, watching.
The guide sees that Jung-Ho is tied up and releases him. Jung-Ho is angry, “Didn’t you tell him that I’m the client?” We flashback to see that Jung-Ho is really the one who stole everyone’s phones and sabotaged the charger. He stepped into the trap on purpose to keep everyone trapped there. Somehow, this is all so Jung-Ho’s mother can get an operation that she needs, an organ transplant.
Jung-ho says he didn’t expect either of the girls to be there, it was just supposed to be the two guys. Meanwhile, Doctor Ma starts operating on Ki-Young, the intended organ donor. We get a flashback to the guy in the woods’ session with the doctor– this isn’t his first kidnapping. They kidnap people and harvest their organs for buyers.
The doctor removes an organ from Ki-Young and then plans to sell the two girls to sex traffickers.
Suddenly, the prisoner from the woods barges in and beats the doctor to death. We see that he was one of the former forced donors who got away, brain-addled from medication and blows to the head, after his daughter’s organs were harvested. Jung-ho leaves with the organ as the prisoner, and the boss fight. Chae-rim shoots the boss, and the older prisoner dies from his own wounds.
Ji-Ae gets loose and goes after Jung-ho in the woods, and since his leg is wounded, he’s not hard to catch up to. She beats him with a mannequin arm, but he beats her to death with the organ container. Then he gets his other leg caught in another bear trap.
As the sun comes up, Chae-rim finds the bodies, the phones, and calls for the police. She has a bunch of valuables in her pocket that she got from that cache of stuff accumulated from victims, so she hangs up and just leaves them all there in the woods.
Commentary
This did not go the way I was expecting from the trailer. It looked like “The Most Dangerous Game,” and there is an element of that. But there’s more going on here than just a crazy hunter going after humans for sport. It turned out to be a lot better than either of us were expecting.
Nice!