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| From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ en/5/59/Chaw_poster.jpg |
Director: Shin Jung-won
Screenplay: Shin Jung-won and Kim
Yung-chul
Cast: Uhm Tae-woong (as Kim
Kang-soo); Jung Yu-mi (as Byun Soo-ryun); Jang Hang-sun (as Chun Il-man); Yoon
Je-moon (as Baek Man-bae); Park Hyuk-kwon (as Detective Shin); Kim Gi-cheon (as
the Village Chief)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #57
The premise of a giant man-eating
boar rampaging a small Korean town - even if it's openly lifting plot structure
from Jaws (1975) - is a solid one to
work with. There's a blurring between guilt over the damage over the
environment human beings have committed and a fear of nature which can be exploited
through a film like this, the notion of nature attacking as a plot, something
which exploded in the seventies, a perfect one to show our inherent weakness in
the wilderness alongside the revealing our own responsibility for said
punishment being handed out to us. A large problem with being able to make
another film like this now is that, if it remotely veers into the area of
monsters, they can easily fall into becoming comical, the result of the Syfy CGI films having a detrimental
effect on taking giant animals seriously. Chaw
does suffer from having to make its giant boar CGI at points but, particularly
as an actual prop boar was used at other points, it's a credible threat
nonetheless especially as a lumbering, tank-like entity which rampages and
gores anything in its way. Following the plot of Kim Kang-soo (Uhm Tae-woong), a cop transferred from
the city of Seoul and expecting to give tractor drivers speeding tickets, and
the police forced to try to stop the animal, this lesser known South Korean
genre movie can make a board devouring people work.
The clichés in fact help, as they
justify the notion that, if something isn't broke, there's no point to fix
them. The Jaws plot that the
officials would rather have tourism at their harvest festival regardless of the
possible deaths works as, like Jaws
and if such an event happened in real life, it brings a conundrum that even to
protect the lives would compromise the economy of the village as it would the
coastal town of Jaws. Having the
old, grizzled hunter Chun Il-man (Jang
Hang-sun) helps as a dramatic lynchpin, going after the boar when it
devours his granddaughter, and as a counter to Baek Man-bae (Yoon Je-moon), the celebrity big game
hunter and former understudy whose magazine appearances and multi-ethnic band
of fellow hunters armed with high tech weaponry aren't a match to the boar's
almost bulletproof fur.
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| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_W7nSPySZ-Dw/SyMs2rIRl4I/ AAAAAAAAAG4/SekGTVwIkt8/s400/vlcsnap-5154029.png |
The problem with Chaw is its strange quirks getting in the way of interesting story development. Asian cinema in general has a lot of tonal shifts so this isn't an issue for me, having become acclimatised and actually fonder of this style than with more rigid Western story telling structure, but Chaw does feel bloated with pieces which prevent the film from fleshing out its characters and plot beyond the starting clichés. For all the funny moments - the utterly incompetent and lazy police chief who demands his young police officers go to pick up maimed body parts from crime scenes, to the stranger jokes like a pair of obnoxious rappers performing at a celebratory party to mostly middle aged farmers - there's aspects, particularly characters, who make no sense and feel out of place. Kang-soo's mother, with dementia but played like a comically absurd figure out of reality, is one, and the most egregious, and actually disturbing, is a homeless mad woman who has claimed a young orphaned boy and beats him if he doesn't call her his mother, something never resolved or actually part of the plot, something that comes off as creepy in a film that's bizarrely whimsical for a great deal of its length.
The film eventually becomes
predictable as well, the blend of action and monster movie starting to lose me
emotionally by the end - it stresses that, as a preference, even a
rollercoaster of a film about thrills needs to take time to put the characters
and their interactions first even for, as here, a railway cart chase from a
boar so I can worry for their situation. The reason Jaws has its legacy, in my opinion, is not just its chills but that
it's a hybrid of turn of the century pulp storytelling and the drama of the
then-modern seventies Hollywood cinema alongside the thrill of the giant shark.
Chaw does well with moderately
interesting and funny characters but by its end, when it needed an adrenaline
boost of emotional drama, it merely peters out. It's certainly an odd,
fascinating duck of a movie - the end credits has the cast, including those who
were eaten, pop up from behind bushes and fences smiling to the camera as their
name appears under them - but the full film merely does the average level of
quality expected from it and nothing more.
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| From https://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production /images/film/chaw/w856/chaw.jpg |
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