Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.5

Chawz Blu-ray Movie Review

Boar-ing

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater April 27, 2011

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—known simply as Chaw in Korea—begins with a succession of burly images of hunters shooting down and chopping up their furry, innocent quarry, a montage that basically serves to warn vegetarians and animal lovers away. We’re then introduced to a Seoul traffic cop, Officer Kim (Eum Tae-woong), who gets transferred to the rural nowheresville of Sam-Mae-Ri—a self-proclaimed “crimeless village”—because he once jokingly wrote “anywhere” as his second choice on a job placement request form. The city boy moves to the country with his pregnant wife and batshit-crazy mother, but the normally peaceful mountainside town is in a tizzy after a local schoolgirl was found chewed to bits. In ominous tones, the girl’s grandfather, Mr. Chun (Jang Hang-sun)—a grizzled old hunter and the film’s analogue to Jaws’ salty seadog Quint—informs us that the killer is most likely a giant boar that has “developed a taste for human organs.” The timing is unfortunate. A group of farmers is coming up from Seoul for the weekend and the kooky village chief (Kim Ki-chun) refuses to call off the harvest festivities. Instead, he calls in professional hunter Baek (Yoon Jae-moon) and his crew of Finnish riflemen, but they only succeed in shooting a smaller pig—the big one’s mate—which, as you can imagine, causes the rampaging boar to go, shall we say, hog wild in revenge. To protect the village, Officer Kim—along with a Jane-Goodall obsessed scientist and most of the aforementioned characters—ventures into the forest on a seek-and-destroy mission, hoping to catch the serial- killing swine in an old pit.

J.J. Abrams, no stranger to the monster movie genre—he produced Cloverfield and directed the upcoming Super-8, which, from its trailer, certainly looks Spielbergian—devoted a few minutes to Jaws in a talk he delivered at a TED convention in 2008, and I find his comments apropos. “The thing about Jaws,” he said, “is that it's really about a guy who's dealing with his place in the world, with his masculinity, with his family, with how he's going to make it work in this new town.” That is, the film isn’t about the shark at all; it’s about the protagonist and his fears. Abrams continued: “When people do sequels or rip-off movies of a genre, they're ripping off the wrong thing. You're not supposed to rip off the shark, or the monster. If you're going to rip something off, rip off the character, rip off the stuff that matters.” He might as well have been talking about Chawz. The film follows the plot of Jaws to the letter, gives us the sharp-tusked equivalent of a land shark, and even has characters that are direct stand-ins for Chief Brody, Quint, and Matt Hooper, but—and here’s where the film goes wrong—the characters are just that, stand-ins. They’re propped-up stereotypes with no real emotional conflicts, and they’re played almost entirely for laughs, which makes it extremely hard to care about them when the film occasionally decides to veer into sentiment. (If you watch a lot of them, you’re probably already familiar with the tendency of many Korean films to try to “touch hearts.”) A better approach would’ve been to follow the Hot Fuzz/Shaun of the Dead model, giving us a protagonist who’s funny but who also has flaws and fears that are more than superficial.

My biggest complaint, though? A film called Chawz shouldn’t be nearly as long as Jaws itself. Clocking in at a tiresome 122 minutes, Chawz could stand to be whittled down to the hour-and-a-half mark, as it tends to dawdle unnecessarily in both its opening act—introducing us to several characters who could’ve been cut from the script entirely—and its drawn-out finale, which takes us into the woods, through a mineshaft, and inside an abandoned factory before arriving at its inevitably explosive conclusion. Jaws could sustain its long runtime with sharp dialogue, suspense, and well-drawn characters—as could The Host, which tread similar ground, balancing drama and comedy perfectly —but Chawz cannot. There’s a lot of excess filler here, and the few beats that are genuinely funny or scary are simply too far apart to hold interest. Even as a purely schlocky, Midnight Movie-type experience, Chawz is a bit of a letdown. A boar with a taste for blood is one hell of a set up for a horror movie, but gorehounds will be sorely disappointed by the film’s lack of viscera. Sure, “Chaw” ruts and gnaws, but most of the best action occurs off-screen, and even when we see the beast in its entirety—a combination of practical effects and not-so-convincing CGI trickery—the editing is so frantic and the choreography so jumbled that we rarely get a good sense of what’s going on. Chalk Chawz up as yet another horror comedy that doesn’t fulfill the promise of its premise.

Chawz Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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.

Chawz Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Chawz Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making of Chawz Featurettes (SD, 1:00:09): A decent three-part documentary that—like the film—seems overlong. Nonetheless, you get plenty of cast/crew interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, visual effects explanations, and interesting bits of trivia, like the fact that all of the "in the woods" scenes were, for some reason, shot outside San Francisco.
• Deleted Scenes (SD, 9:39): Your usual assortment of scenes that were cut for good reason.
• Q&A Session Premiere Event (SD, 3:49): Not many Q's or A's here, just three minutes of the cast and director being awkwardly photographed by fans and the press.
• Blooper Reel Poster Shots (SD, 4:12): Outtakes from the film's poster photo shoot.
• International Trailer (SD, 1:55)
• Also From Magnolia Home Entertainment Blu-ray (1080p, 4:30)

Chawz Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.