6.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
A black comedy about the events that are set into motion in a town after a man-eating boar goes on a rampage.
Starring: Jung Yu-mi, Uhm Tae-woong, Jang Hang-seon, Yoo-i Ha, Seong-kwang HaHorror | 100% |
Foreign | 60% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Korean: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
48kHz, 16-bit DTS-HD MA for both Korean & English.
English, English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
BD-Live
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Over the past decade or so, the South Korean film industry has gained an international reputation for putting out intelligent, atmospheric genre films that frequently get the better of Hollywood, like Park Chan-wook’s violent “Vengeance” trilogy, Bong Joon-ho’s creature-feature satire The Host, and Kim Ji-woon’s sumptuous haunted house story A Tale of Two Sisters. These films and their genre-bending directors have been both commercially successful and artistically credible, spawning numerous me-too imitators and lesser-thans. Among them is Shin Jeong-won, who made his debut in 2004 with the scatterbrained horror-comedy To Catch a Virgin Ghost—a.k.a. Sisily 2km—and whose latest film, Chawz, about a massive killer boar, is being billed as “Jaws on land.” No, it’s nowhere near as good as it sounds. Like Virgin Ghost, Chawz can’t commit to being fully scary or funny, so it tries to do both. Poorly. The film is very self-aware that it’s a Jaws rip-off—with a few Jurassic Park and Predator nods thrown in for good measure—but it steals all the wrong parts, it isn’t really funny, and it has a severe dearth of scares.
"Chaw," land shark...
Chawz chews its way onto Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's wildly inconsistent. There are scenes in the film that are sharp and vibrant, with all the high definition detail you expect, and others that look murky and soft. Daylight scenes fare better, with finely resolved textures in facial features and clothing, while nighttime sequences tend to look more muddy and crushed. The thing is, I don't think we can entirely blame Magnolia's digital-to-digital transfer. Most of the issues that the image exhibits appear to be source or post-processing related. The film was shot digitally, which gives it a slightly cheaper look, and there are the usual video-related PQ quibbles—overexposure in highlights, occasionally weak colors, and noisy, grayish blacks. In post, the color grading veers between realistic and stylized, with intentionally desaturated or overpumped hues, and skin tones throughout are pretty pasty. While compression issues are limited to light noise, you'll sometimes notices the halo-like aftereffects of edge enhancement. Overall, the image is certainly watchable, but it's no eye candy, that's for sure.
Like most Magnolia releases of Asian titles, Chawz includes both its original language mix and an English dub, both presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. The dub, as you'd expect, is pretty bad—in terms of voice acting, not sound quality—so you'll probably want to stick with the good but not quite great Korean track. As an action/horror/comedy about a boar gone wild, you can expect Chawz' sound design to ramp up during the hunt/attack sequences, with gunshots puncturing the rear speakers, frantic voices, and lots—lots—of cross-channel squealing. The effects are immersive but not necessarily convincing, as they seem a little stagy to me. During quieter scenes, you'll also hear an appreciable amount of ambience, from Seoul traffic sounds to the crickets, wind, and birds in the great outdoors. The audio sounds relatively full and clean throughout the spectrum—from the occasional low-end subwoofer throbs to high-end sounds—and the dialogue rests clearly at the top of the mix. Optional English, English Narrative, English SDH, and Spanish subtitles are available in easy to read white lettering.
If the prospect of "Jaws on land" has you excited, be prepared to tame your expectations. Overlong, only marginally funny, and not scary in the slightest, there are very few reasons to recommend this Korean monster movie mash-up. Even the film's Blu-ray presentation is a mediocre affair, with a decent audio track but a grubby, muddy high definition image. Unless you're a Koreaphile who sees every K-film that makes its way to the U.S., I'd say skip this one.
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