CHAW Review

Arriving in the wake of a recent monster movie rejuventation that's seen the likes of Cloverfield and Host gain critical and commercial success, Chaw is another South Korean entry into the genre that plays for laughs rather than scares. When Seoul police officer, Kim (Tae-woong Eom), fills in his transfer application form with his second choice of posting destination as "anywhere", the ill-conceived joke lands him in the "Crimeless Village", a quiet rural backwater. With his pregnant wife and senile mother in tow, things aren't looking great for Kim. It turns out however that, for once, there's a crime to investigate - someone, or something, is digging up graves and eating the bodies. The culprit is soon revealed as a giant CGI boar, who's quickly moving on from corpses to live human prey. Joined by some professional hunters, Kim sets out to slay the beast, amid a flurry of pig-based site gags.

A hybrid of backwoods/redneck horror ala Deliverance, and conventional monster movie, there's familiar fish-out-of-water comedy as the city policeman marvels at the crazy locals, before eventually warming to them. References to the genre heritage are thrown in, with Jaws receiving a particularly explicit nod.

Horror comedies are a notoriously difficult trick to pull off (An American Werewolf in London is probably still the best) and your take on Chaw will almost certainly depend on how funny you find this particular brand of gurning black comedy (I know X really liked this and touched on the 'lost in translation' issues in his review). For me, as a straight monster movie it doesn't really work, neither gorey enough as a shocker nor thrilling enough as a chase and evade movie. It also lacks the large scale spectacle of Host. That would be fine, because its agenda lies squarely as a comic monster flick, but the humour left me largely unmoved. Stereotypes abound and the eccentricity of the locals is a decidedly tired device that really added nothing new to the well-worn genre. The monster itself suffers from blatant CGI that distances it from the real action and means you never really fear for anyone.

Chaw is by no means bad, it's just a rather benign romp. There's fun to be had in a midnight movie kind of way, beer in hand, and there are some successful comic moments - mostly involving cute piglets. Ultimately though, it falls between two stools and, at nearly 2 hours, outstays its welcome.

Somewhat ironically (given the mostly CGI nature of the boar) and in light of Ard's recent 'Have Your Say' you may be interested to hear that the BBFC saw fit to cut 8 seconds from Chaw as follows: "cuts were made to remove sight of unsimulated cruelty to animals (a boar being chased and attacked by dogs; a live deer strung up and struggling on a frame; a live eel being cooked)."

Chaw is out on UK DVD from 1st March via Optimum Releasing.