CHAW (Korea, 2009)
Directed by: Shin Jung-Won
Starring: Uhm Tae-Woong, Jung Yu-Mi, Jang Hang-Sun

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to eating pork, here comes CHAW. A bacon-flavored version of THE HOST, this flick is a take on JAWS only with a giant killer pig instead of a giant killer shark and, probably, a lot more pot got smoked while the script was being written. If you’re looking for straight-up horror you won’t find it here. But if you want to see the horror genre turned on its head in a movie that’s 50% black comedy, 50% animal rights manifesto, 50% action comedy, and 150% off the rails, then this pig’s for you.

Sameri, the Crimeless Village, where the police are more interested in picking wildflowers and peeping in windows that anything else. Big city cop, Officer Kim (Uhm Tae-Woong) gets transferred from Seoul to this sleepy backwater burb and he hates it from his very first breath of country air. He hates it even more when the local scheme to rip off city slickers with a bogus “Organic Farming Project” that brings yuppies flocking to Sameri’s orchards on the weekends is interrupted by a giant boar attack. The mayor refuses to close the mountain (“It’s harvest season!” he protests) but as the half-eaten bodies pile up something has to be done. Their solution is to hire cocky, dim-witted professional hunter, Yun Je-Mun, (with his telepathic, Russian-speaking hunting dog), to go into the woods and kill the killer pig.

But we’ve all seen JAWS and we know how this turns out: badly. Finally, the only solution is for a ragtag band of losers to head into the forest themselves to bring this hairy, homicidal pig down. Massive setpieces pay homage to everything from JURASSIC PARK to ALIENS and the tension is constantly undermined by a deeply weird sense of humor: the local conservationist demands that hunters do multiple takes when they discover shocking evidence of the pig's bloodlust, Officer Kim’s senile mother is an endless source of humiliation, the slick cop sent from the big city to investigate turns out to be a kleptomaniac. It all comes to a head during the final hunt which morphs into a leisurely ode to the magical spell of the great outdoors as everyone bonds around the campfire, momentarily oblivious to the giant pig snuffling around in the darkness.

The killer boar itself is one part cheesy special effect, and two parts out-of-control, screaming freight train of porky terror. With wacky slapstick sitting next to PETA-caliber shock footage, and ecological concerns (wild boars in Korea really have been endangered by human encroachment) nuzzling up next to absurdist action (a giant pig attacks a karaoke party), CHAW changes tone and mood so quickly that it’ll give you whiplash. The result is more like a movie by Joe Dante (GREMLINS) than Steven Spielberg, and by the time it's over you'll never again be able to look your bacon in its eye.