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 ere's the heads up on the new South Korean horror
film "R-Point", a movie set during the tail end of the Vietnam
War: it's not so much as scary as it is psychologically interesting, with a
heavy dose of atmosphere to help you get over the lack of horror. Not much
happens in the film that will make you jump or shriek in fright, and instead
the action is generated from suspense and atmosphere, two things
"R-Point" has in great abundance. As such, the Vietnam War setting
is mostly incidental, and you could extract the characters and place them
in, say, a German bunker during World War II and you would have the British
horror film "The
Bunker".
"R-Point" stars
Woo-seong Kam ("Crazy
Marriage" and recently "Spider
Forest") as hardnosed Lieutenant Choi Tae-in. After an incident
involving a Viet Cong saboteur at a Vietnamese motel, Choi is assigned to
take a platoon and journey to the isolated area of Romeo Point (or R-Point),
where a platoon of South Koreans had gone missing 6 months earlier. Arriving
at the designated location, Choi finds an abandoned building in the middle
of nowhere, surrounded by the graves of those who entered R-Point, but never
left. Before the platoon can figure out what's going on, they discover a
shocking revelation: a man in their platoon, who they all thought was one of
them, turns out to be one of the missing men they were sent to find.
It's "got one over you" twists like the
above that makes "R-Point" a very entertaining film, the kind of
movie that keeps you guessing until the very end. In truth,
"R-Point" is not the anti-war movie many have claim it to be,
and as mentioned, its Vietnam War setting is purely incidental. If
writer/director Su-chang Kong (who also wrote "Tell
Me Something") had somehow pictured his film as being in the same
veins as other Vietnam anti-war film as "Platoon" and
"Apocalypse Now", he failed miserably. Simply put, the film just
isn't deep, or intelligent, enough to make any kind of statement.
But as a purely psychological horror movie,
"R-Point" is quite good. Up front and in charge is a very stout
and dependable Woo-seong Kam, whose character sports a calm demeanor and a
certain way about him that will remind people of Ronald Speirs from "Band
of Brothers". It's uncanny how Choi remains in complete control
throughout the entire ordeal, even as his men come unglued. In fact, the
soldiers fall apart so easily and with such swiftness that you wonder if
an army consisting of Madonna, Britney Spears, and J-Lo couldn't have done
a better job staying calm. I'm pretty sure the speed with which Choi's men
falls to pieces is some kind of record in a war movie.
To no one's surprise, the cast blurs by as a series
of indistinguishable faces and singular behavior traits or background
information. We get the tough Sergeant (there's always one in every war
movie), the cowardly greenhorn (again, always one in every war movie), and
of course there's the guy that keeps showing the picture of his family
back home to everyone. (Want to guess if this guy is going to make it?)
Not surprisingly, when soldiers start dying, the viewers will simply be
calculating the bodycount. Not that it matters in films like these. In a
way, the genre has become so ridiculously unoriginal that the only way to
make fans sit up and take notice is to write background characters that
actually stand out as individuals.
The one important element that horror fans should
know is that "R-Point" is not particularly gory. In fact, it's
not very gory at all, or at least nothing that would convince you the
filmmakers put very much thought into how the characters will get their
comeuppance. Most of the deaths come by way of gunshot wounds, although
there is a relatively small bodycount until the film's final 15 minutes,
when the soldiers start dropping like flies at each other's hands.
It should also be mentioned that
"R-Point's" ending is more than a little derivative of John
Carpenter's "The
Thing", with Choi forcing the soldiers to "prove" their
identity or get shot. Also, the film's climactic Third Act is a bit of a
letdown, not to mention anti-climactic. With all the ghostly visions and
supernatural happenings that have occurred up to now, all we get are
soldiers standing in a room shooting at -- and stabbing -- each other?
It's not much of a payoff, and feels as if Kong had written himself into a
corner, and had no idea how to get out of it except to make his characters
pull their guns on each other. And for you Asian horror film fans out
there, the answer is, Yes, they do manage to toss in a female ghost with
long black hair into "R-Point".
Of course if you approached "R-Point" as
purely a vessel of supernatural entertainment, it's quite good. The
direction by Su-chang Kong gets off to a slow start, with scenes of the
soldiers in Vietnam looking ridiculously tame, at least in comparison to
all the other Vietnam War movies we're used to seeing. The film has a lot
of good scenes, especially during moments with the platoon in the
wide-open fields in search of their missing comrades. It's actually in
broad daylight, using some clever camera tricks, that the filmmakers
achieve the film's best moments. A scene, when a character stumbles across
a squad of ghost soldiers, is one of the film's highlights, eliciting some
creepy vibes without any of the cheap gimmicks one is used to from the
genre.
"R-Point" is a very well done supernatural
thriller, with an excellent performance by Woo-seong Kam. It's atmospheric
when it needs to be, and the visuals are quite excellent across the
board. The early moments are completely devoid of ghostly entanglements,
making the rest of the film all the more effective. On the negative side,
Su-chang Kong could have used more subtlety when it comes to the
ghost-related scenes, and it might have been a good idea not to show us
the POV of the ghosts using nightvision green light. Who knew ghosts wore
nightvision goggles?
Aside from some minor complaints, as well as an
ending that doesn't quite come through with the expected slam-bang payoff,
"R-Point" is nevertheless still better than most of its fellow
Asian ghost stories by a mile and a half. At the very least, it's
different, and taken in consideration with the current sad state of the
Korean horror scene, being "different" mind as well qualify
"R-Point" for top honors.
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