Witchtrap

We originally chose this movie for Father’s Day, but other things came up. This Korean flick involves a father fighting for his daughter’s life as the town where he works as a cop becomes overrun by a strange kind of sickness. Universally regarded as fantastic, we look at it from our own unique perspectives and give you our own take.

The Wailing (2016)

Episode 230, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of two guys and a chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: I chose the movie for this week. We’ve been doing a lot of requests lately and it was coming up around father’s day. And I suggested did this film. This is a 2016 South Korean horror film called the wailing. It came highly recommended by a lot of people.

It has a 99% positive review on rotten tomatoes. It’s directed by now Hong gin. It seemed to have a lot to do with fatherhood and fathers in the story centers around his father, more or less trying to save his daughter. And so I thought it would be inappropriate movie for father’s day and because I’d heard so much good stuff about it online.

Uh, some people saying it was the best movie of 2016, one of the best horror films to come around and decades, I thought we’d needed to watch it and give it a whirl. It’s also available on Amazon prime. So when we’re done talking about it, if it strikes your fancy. Oh, you can watch it as well. What I wasn’t terribly excited about was the two and a half hour running time.

But, uh, everything I had read online said the movie, uh, earns it totally. So, um, we gave it a whirl and, uh, we watched it. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. But I had not really heard about this movie until a few days ago when I sought it out and suggested to Craig that we watch it. How about you, Craig?

Craig: Uh, it’s funny. Cause I thought that I hadn’t heard of it either. And then when I started reading about it a little bit, I realized that I had actually, I already seen it. Uh, I saw it last year. About this time I have a cousin in Denver, uh, or actually Colorado brings who is also a big horror fan. And he and I talk about movies quite a bit when we see each other and.

He said that this was what he thought was right. Best horror movies he’d ever seen. And so when I was out there last summer, we sat down to watch it, but we got kind of, it’s a two and a half hour long movie, and we don’t see each other very often. So we found ourselves. Pausing a lot, just kind of talk and we didn’t actually get all the way through it.

And so when I got back home to Missouri, I finished it here. So I had seen it, but I didn’t really remember a whole lot about it, but then going in and watching it again, I remembered it and I remembered what was going on. As far as evaluation goes, you know, where do you stand? I don’t want to show my hands who are really

Todd: well.

Um, This is pretty Korean horror movie. It’s a pretty Korean movie, I think. Uh, it’s pretty bleak. It’s a little, I think at times Lynchian I think it’s very, uh, uh, a little opaque even though. It has a plot that makes sense and is moving forward, it’s happening at its own pace. And it’s very dreamlike pace almost to the movie.

Also very realistic there, long moments of silence. There are shots of beauty, sort of mixed in with shots of ugliness. I just felt for at first that I could really get behind the main character, the guy who’s a policeman. His name is, uh, John goo. Who’s just a small, small, rural village policeman. They don’t seem to have more than a few cops here at their local police station up in the mountains.

And they have this small rural village. And the crux of it is that people, uh, well, he, he goes and he visits a crime scene where, uh, somebody has completely murdered, uh, his family stabbed. Stab the many times, and it’s sitting outside on the porch, almost catatonic and looking horrible with just boils. And the body skin is black and the eyes are Milky.

White looks like a zombie. You know, it evokes that kind of image from a zombie movie, but it’s cuffed. You know, and just sitting there, and this is not the first of these kinds of murders that happen in this town. There are several that go on and they all pretty much followed a similar pattern. And I think that the character of the policeman in this movie was extremely relatable.

He doesn’t swoop in like a man in charge who knows what’s going on and knows what to do. He seems. More or less dumbfounded and distracted by everything that’s happening. And it’s not really until his daughter becomes afflicted with these sores, um, and burn kind of burn like sores that they’ve been noticing on Wolf.

For example, those people who ...