CHAWZ Blu-ray Review

Magnet Releasing:

A young police officer is transferred from Seoul to a small village in the countryside for duty when he jokingly checked the box to be deployed "anywhere." Arriving at the village, he encounters a bumbling police force who is working with a special detective to resolve some recent murders. As the bodies add up, it becomes clear that the gruesome deaths are attributed to a beast of an animal with a voracious appetite for human flesh. A famous hunter and his team are called in to track and destroy the man-eater. During their tracking expedition, they are confronted by a boar of massive size and strength, which they discover may be a result of experimentation during wartimes. Unprepared and unarmed for taking down the mutant creature, the group must disband as the hunters become the hunted.

Magnet Releasing are very aggressively marketing this film as Jaws on land, and there is some validity to that.  The action takes place before a big festival for a small town that stands to earn them a lot of money.  The town leaders want the forest (beach) open since it is a big tourist attraction during the festival.  When they find out that there is a man-eating wild boar (shark) on the loose, they call up a big time hunter, and when he fails they call in an expert.  There are some minor changes that bring story from the water onto land, and they make the killer boar a Daddy, to up the ante. 

We followed the film during its production and when it finally released in Korea, we were among the first to review it.  Our reactions were somewhat lukewarm.  Korean film guru, X, said:

Is it a good film? It depends on what you're looking for. If a proper monster flick with solid production values is what you demand, you'll damn the day you've ever approached something like this. If you instead want to see something completely insane, driven by a grumpy, crude, reckless but endearing thematic consciousness, a fabulous cast and the kind of eclectic energy you rarely see in this kind of setup, then this might be the most fun you'll have in quite some time. Either way, it's something you won't likely forget, something with a soul. After all, isn't that what cult films are made of?

Sort of in agreement with that tepid praise, Joshua Chaplinsky said:

I'm sure there's an audience out there for Chaw's slapdash mash-up of genre, but brother, it ain't me. It's probably more fun in a theatre full of people than at home with the word "SAMPLE" permanently burned into the screen, but it didn't bring enough laughs or gore for my tastes. I appreciate a new take on an old idea, but in the end Chaw only succeeded in making me hungry for Korean barbecue.

I must say that I fall somewhere in the middle.  I liked Chaw(z) a lot, but I didn't love it.  The CG and production value didn't bother me as much as it did the other guys, I tried to judge it on its own terms.  It was a cheap horror movie, and it kinda looked that way, so what?  My biggest problem with the film was that at two hours, it was just too damned long for a creature feature.  Apart from that, I had a lot of fun.

The Disc:

Chaw(z) was filmed digitally, and therefore this Blu-ray, I can assume, looks pretty damned close to the director's intentions.  That being said, the picture has a couple of weird issues that may be intentional but were distracting to me.  For one, the highlights clip pretty frequently.  Much of the film takes place during hunts at night, but when they shoot in daylight, there are a lot of lost highlights and times when the whites bloom into other colored areas of the picture.  This is when the digital format is most irritating, it doesn't have the same dynamic range as film, and so when you hit big highlights or deep blacks, often you lose a lot of detail.  Apart from that, the transfer (can we still call it that if it was digital to begin with?) looks great.  There is plenty of fine detail, and the colors look pretty solid.  The CG can look a bit dodgy in HD, but it is low budget, so that's to be expected. I didn't find it distracting in the heat of the moment.

The audio fares quite a bit better.  I have no issues to report on the audio front.  The Korean DTS-HS MA 5.1 track is bold and punchy with plenty of action in the surrounds and it does a very decent job of bringing the audience into the picture.  There is also an English dub that I sampled that was as good, or bad, as any other English dub.  I know they think these are still necessary to sell to a larger market, but I don't really think that's the case any more.  Oh well, it's there.

The Extras:

Magnet have provided a number of extras of decent length.  There are three main "making of" featurettes; one focusing on the difficulties of producing a Korean film in America with a crew that didn't speak Korean, one featuring the five main protagonists and the evolution of their characters and the actors behind them, and a third focusing on the balancing act between horror and comedy in Chaw(z), which I thought was done pretty well.  Those three featurettes add up to about one hour and can be played continuously or one at a time.  There are also a few inconsequential deleted scenes, a featurette titled "Blooper Reel Poster Shots" which is just the cast goofing around during the photo session for the poster, there is something labeled as "Q&A Session Premiere Event" which isn't a Q&A, but instead the main actors introducing themselves at the premiere and lasts less than 4 minutes, and finally the international trailer.

Magnet Releasing have done a fine job getting this little nature gone wild flick onto Blu-ray.  I believe this is the only English friendly HD release out there, and it's pretty damned good, it's no Jaws, but I'll take it!

Chawz by Magnet Releasing is hard coded for Region A.