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Late to the Party: Train to Busan (2016)
It seems like it was farther back than 2016 when Train to Busan, the South Korean genre-bending zombie movie, was at the top of both critic and fan year-end lists everywhere. So, by just getting around to seeing it now, I’m not showing up incredibly late to this party, more like fashionably late. But I am the last of my circle to see it.
My reasoning behind waiting for so long to finally check it out is simple. I have been completely bored with zombie movies for years now, so nothing about the movie excited me. Even when people would tell me that it was their favorite movie of the year, and that it’s not “really” a zombie movie, I still couldn’t get interested. The two-hour running time turned me off a bit as well, since I am the king of the eighty-minute slasher flick, and two hours is a ridiculously long time to watch zombies feast on humans. But alas, in the name of Late to the Party, I fired up my Netflix and hit play on Train to Busan.
Immediately, I could see why people would think that this was more than just a “normal” zombie movie. There’s a human element to the story from the start, with the struggle between the father and the mother for custody of their daughter, and the father being pulled between work and family. And that’s not the only interesting backstory, either; just about every character on the train, from the confrontational jerk who just wants to protect his pregnant wife to the youth baseball team travelling with their girlfriends, has a mythology that reaches beyond the frame of the zombie attack. The characters development, even when most of it occurs off-screen, raises the emotional stakes and helps the audience empathize with the principals.
But Train to Busan is, first and foremost, a zombie movie. The zombies are cool, closer to 28 Days Later… than they are to The Walking Dead, but they are still, in fact, zombies, so they’re a threat that modern viewers have seen ad nauseum. And the zombies in Train to Busan don’t bring much to the table as far as re-invention goes. They swarm and cooperate like the undead in World War Z, but other than that, they’re just the typical Return of the Living Dead, fast-moving zombies.
There’s an exercise in film school screenwriting classes where the student is asked to spice up a tired old trope by changing the setting. Stick your slasher in a submarine. Put your vampires in a high-rise. Set your creature feature in an airplane (I’m convinced that this is how we got Snakes on a Plane). That’s what Train to Busan feels like to me, like someone tried to breathe new life into the retreaded zombie genre by throwing most of the action on a moving train. And for the most part, it works. It’s got a Snowpiercer meets the Dawn of the Dead remake vibe to it, but that’s better than seeing zombies traipse around a dilapidated graveyard, isn’t it?
It seems that I may have been a victim of the hype train (no pun intended), as Train to Busan didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I was expecting it to be much more than a zombie movie, but that’s really all it is. It’s one in which the deaths hit harder because the film builds relationships between the audience and the characters, but when the dust settled, it was just a very well-crafted zombie flick. It’s a good movie, but I’ll probably never find the need to watch it again. I might even forget that I watched it this time.
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Feature image by Chris Fischer.
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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