Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

The Divine Fury Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 13, 2019

What religion do you associate with the Korean peninsula, if you in fact associate any religion with that region at all? Kind of surprisingly (at least to me, anyway), a lot of Koreans, in fact the vast majority of them, evidently don’t describe themselves as belonging to any organized religion, but among those who do identify themselves as being affiliated with a set of beliefs, Buddhism is not the “leader”, which I personally found at least a little unexpected. Instead, Protestantism is evidently the most subscribed to form of belief, though Buddhism comes in a relatively close second. Catholicism is (again, perhaps surprisingly) the “winner” of the “bronze” in this particular competition, which means that the Catholic underpinning of The Divine Fury is at least somewhat based in fact. That said, The Divine Fury struggles pretty mightily to sustain its conceit, which involves a man named Yong-hoo* (Park Seo-joon) who is (are you ready?) a Mixed Martial Arts fighter who develops a stigmata which magically provides him with the power to expel and/or kill demons who have possessed various Koreans. How’s that for a so-called “high concept”?

The story actually begins with Yong-hoo as a little boy, being raised by his widower father after his mother died in childbirth. It’s a Sunday and the father and son are on their way to church, where Dad makes Yong-hoo promise to pray especially hard. At church, the priest offers a homily which confidently states that God will always answer prayers, albeit sometimes after a decided delay and not always as the petitioner might be expecting. Little Yong-hoo rather wisely asks his father if his father prayed for Yong-hoo’s mother to live, and Dad states that while he did, Mom was praying for the baby to live, and probably prayed harder, hence the somewhat bittersweet outcome.

Suffice it to say that Yong-hoo is quickly completely orphaned, which understandably leads to a crisis in faith for the little boy (including beaning a priest with a crucifix at his father's funeral) which he then carries into his adulthood. The film simply segues to those adult years, with a kind of weird opening vignette detailing an MMA bout where Yong-hoo is obviously nursing considerable rage, perhaps aided and abetted by that “still small voice” some hear in their most introspective moments, albeit in this case a voice that sounds suspiciously like Mercedes McCambridge’s now legendary work in The Exorcist. When Yong-hoo ends up with a stigmata on one of his hands, and is evidently being attacked by at least one nefarious demon like entity, he consults a child medium who informs him he’s “screwed” (her actual words, at least according to the translation in the subtitles), and tells him to go to a cross near his home where he’ll meet someone who can help him.

That’s where this film’s “buddy” aspect enters the fray, as Yong-hoo becomes a perhaps unwitting acolyte of Father Ahn (Ahn Sung-ki), a “Vatican approved” exorcist who evidently is on a one man mission to rid Korea of demonic activity. And there’s apparently a lot of demonic activity for Father Ahn and Yong-hoo to combat, leading to a number of showdowns which fitfully exploit the same kind of freaky ambience that made the William Peter Blatty opus about possession so memorable. Unfortunately, there’s no “Ragen” per se in this film, and instead the story darts to and fro detailing a series of people with demonic possession “issues”, albeit admittedly all ultimately pointing the way toward what in a video game might be thought of as a the “boss level”.

The Divine Fury is occasionally quite stylish, but it’s never very scary in the way that “traditional” exorcism movies often are. When the story exploits the hand to hand combat element that is part of its MMA subplot, it actually sparks fitfully to life, but even these sequences come of as kind of silly, especially when Yong-hoo’s stigmata becomes a flaming appendage that may remind some of Johnny Storm from The Fantastic Four. The story wends its way toward a totally predictable conclusion, with the “added benefit” of teasing a sequel that will evidently be called The Green Exorcist, which I’m going to go out on a limb and assume does not involve something akin to solar energy.

*The back cover of this release transliterates this name as Yong-hu, but the IMDb and other online sources list it as Yong-hoo, for those who care about such things.

The Divine Fury Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Divine Fury is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists a couple of Arri Alexa models as having been utilized on this shoot, with a 2K DI. This is a rather stylish looking film, one that is often bathed in deep reds, blues and purples, with a perhaps surprising amount of detail and even fine detail able to penetrate the rather aggressive grading. Brightly lit moments, as in the opening vignette between little Yong-hoo and his father, really pop quite warmly and have a natural looking palette. Some of the CGI can look a bit soft, especially some of the lighting effects surrounding Yong-hoo's hand, but other effects like the stigmata itself can be rather gruesome looking. There are some deficits in shadow detail in the very darkest scenes in the film, notably the sequence I compared above to the "boss level" in a video game.

The Divine Fury Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Divine Fury features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes in the original Korean and an English dub. There actually is a brief flirtation with English in the Korean language version (during the MMA fight), but my advice is to stick with the original language version unless reading subtitles is absolute anathema to you. There's good surround activity throughout this presentation, with expected crowd moments like the MMA bout providing consistent immersion, and with the various showdowns with those afflicted with demons also often offering good discrete channelization of effects. Dialogue, score and effects are all rendered cleanly and clearly with excellent fidelity and generally good prioritization.

The Divine Fury Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of

  Special Effects (1080i; 1:35)

  
  

  Item Commentary (1080i; 3:22) looks at props.

  
  

  Production Documentary (1080i; 3:35)

  
  

  The World of Evil (1080i; 1:47)

  
  

  Interview with James Jean (1080p; 1:52)

• Trailer A (1080p; 1:55)


• Trailer B (1080p; 1:42)


• U.S. Trailer (1080p; 1:47)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the disc has been authored so that the supplements follow one another automatically (so that clicking on the Special Effects featurette under the Making Of submenu is essentially a "Play All" button. After the U.S. trailer for this film plays, the disc has been authored to move on automatically to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

The Divine Fury Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Divine Fury has somewhat muddled metaphysics but perhaps more problematically simply doesn't provide much in the way of actual scares. Instead, this begins as a rather interesting analysis of a man devoured by his own rage against fate and/or Divinity, but quickly devolves into a silly escapade where seemingly every other Korean has been possessed by some nefarious demon. The film is rather stylish, though, and for those considering a purchase, technical merits are solid.