Project Wolf Hunting (Kim Hong-seon, 2022)

There's no escaping this brutal carnage

The way this movie was pitched to me was “Con Air, but with a monster that hunts the convicts on board.”

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The setup is that a bunch of Korean criminals that previously evaded capture by fleeing to the Philippines have now been arrested by the authorities there and are being extradited back to Korea on a cargo ship chartered by Korean authorities.

Things do not go according to plan.

The prisoners have a plan to escape. They take over the ship and steer it far clear of the imprisonment that awaits them in their home country.

But there’s also another group of people stowed away in the bowels of the ship… Two crooked doctors transporting what appears to be a maggot-ridden corpse, but which is somehow still alive — and after the convicts have killed the majority of their captors and copious amounts of blood has been spilled, things get gnarlier still as this living corpse awakens and goes on a bloody rampage of his own.

Alpha, as he’s known, is an immortal villain with superhero-caliber powers resulting from cruel experiments inflicted on him during WWII. Now, he’s an unstoppable and unrelenting killing machine with enormous strength and speed that mindlessly murders everyone he comes in contact with.

And since the film takes place on an isolated ship, everyone aboard is his prey.

Despite my opening comparison to one of the best action movies of the 90s, Project Wolf Hunting is very much its own thing.

While there are aspects of late 90s action cinema present in the lengthy setup (including backstory of a prior disastrous attempt to similarly return another group of criminals back to Korea) and the inclusion of a shadowy government-affiliated group that takes over Vessel Tracking Services to monitor the ship’s progress, the genre is very much Korean action horror.

This is a very violent film. It is vicious and brutal. There is an incredible amount of blood.

For all the unrushed establishing of the story’s context and characters, once all hell breaks loose, no-one, it seems, is safe. Alpha is The Terminator if he killed Sarah Connor and then just kept on killing people in as ferocious a fashion as possible until absolutely everyone was dead.

Horror fans will take pleasure in the murderous mayhem that ensues here — and be pleased to note that there are moments of levity that can be found amongst all the extreme brutality. Though this is more “violent action” territory that we’re in than “gross-out gore.” Alpha is no Art the Clown — he’s a killing machine that is precisely that: a ruthless automaton. He takes no pleasure in his brutality. He exists to kill. And kill he does. Simple as that.

And that is precisely where the horror of it all comes from. Because even if the aforementioned psychopathic jester will torture you to death for the sheer fun of it, you can still beg for your life… But with Alpha, you know instinctively there is no point.

All you can do is run away and put obstacles between you and certain death. All you can do is hope to survive a little longer. But he’ll get you in the end. He’s literally an unstoppable killing machine incarnate.