Chaw Review

Chaw is undoubtedly the movie about a giant killer boar to end all movies about a giant killer boar. Though that’s not really saying an awful lot. Director Jeong-won Shin brings us a comedy-horror romp all the way from Korea concerning a sleepy village being upset by bloody great wild pig. And obviously, it’s up to the new cop in town, officer Kim (Tae-woong Eom), and his motley crew of ragtag villagers to stop the beast in its enormous tracks.

Obviously it doesn’t take a genius, or indeed anyone even remotely familiar with the schlock-horror B-movie genre to hazard a fairly accurate guess at the plot. Needless to say, a monster is on the loose and several people are going to get messily eviscerated before it can be stopped. As with most horror films, it’s not so much ‘what’s going to happen?’ as ‘how’s it going to happen?’ that is the most pertinent question the audience finds itself asking.

Unfortunately, Chaw is not quite as inventive as it needs to be to truly stand out from the teeming masses of straight to DVD horror escapades. It lacks the imagination of say The Host, to pick an example from its home country, or such fare as Slither, to choose a Western equivalent. There aren’t enough blood and guts to satisfy the gore hounds and the film is too good-natured to really chill or scare.

Where Chaw succeeds, however, is in its goofy, occasionally slapstick sense of humour and in its frequent digressions into the surreal. The humour is weird and wacky; every other character it seems is mildly unhinged, which make for some bizarre scenes. Kim’s elderly mother is a batshit mental fruitloop who behaves like an ADHD eight year old and has to be carried her around on her son’s back. This at first struck me as uncomfortably weird, but eventually her senility drew out the laughs it was played for. It gets away with this potential miscarriage of taste due to the charm of the old lady and the rest of the cast, many of whom are delightfully bumbling amateurs, who frankly have little to no business hunting down a Jeep-sized pig. The film’s taste for the surreal exemplifies itself many times, notably through scenes involving talking dogs, mad hermit ladies and exploding backsides. There’s also a great false ending, though obviously I won’t spoil that for you.

Sadly, some dialogue is lost in translation (“my love for you is A++!” sings a character at one point) and the film meanders lazily with a slightly bloated runtime. Though far from perfect, Chaw will make a decent addition to any horror fan’s DVD collection who is looking for a change from relentless carnage and perhaps wonders what a three stooges horror film would look like. Chaw: not without flaws, though hardly a bore, minimal gore and hard to ignore.