The Plague review – water polo camp turns into tween hellscape with impressive stylistic bite

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With Fincher-like intent, director Charlie Polinger scopes out concealed psychological depths in a debut that sees the laws of the jungle play out Set at a boy’s water polo training camp in the summer of 2003, Charlie Polinger’s debut feature plunges beneath the waterline to scope out concealed psychological depths. It may not be news that these kids operate in a brutal, animal-like hierarchy driven by braggadocio, bullying, hazing and gaslighting – but from the stunning initial submerged shot of a pool glittering like a starfield, Polinger brings impressive stylistic bite to this tween hellscape: the kind of trenchant intent you might associate with David Fincher. Latecomer Ben (Everett Blunck) is thrown in at the deep end when he arrives. Desperate to ingratiate himself with the cool crowd lorded over by the impish Jake (Kayo Martin), he aims to avoid the pariah status of house lummox Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who is supposedly afflicted with a (made-up) disease the brats dub “the pla...
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Project Wolf Hunting review – Korean horror brings Bruckheimer-esque bombast

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Korea’s most wanted escape their handcuffs on a cargo ship back to the motherland but find they are not alone in bloody thriller

If you had a pound for every slashed jugular and staved-in cranium in this Korean horror-thriller, you would probably have more than the film’s entire budget. This seems to have been mostly spent on supplies of fake blood almost copious enough to run the sprinkler system on Frontier Titan, the 58,000-tonne cargo ship travelling between the Philippines and South Korea in Kim Hong-sun’s film.

Forget Con Air; this is Con Sea, with bruiser cop Seok-woo (Park Ho-san) in charge of escorting a dirty dozen or so fugitives back to the motherland. First among evils is Jong-doo (Seo In-guk), a rapist with boyband looks and tattoos up to his jawline, who earns an early beating from Seok-woo after threatening his daughter. It doesn’t take a doctorate in whup-ass studies to guess that the criminals don’t stay in handcuffs for long. But – unbeknown to all but the doctor who keeps sneaking down to the basement – they are not Frontier Titan’s only cargo. Suffice it to say that transporting this thing on the same ship as Korea’s most wanted is the action-movie equivalent of that meme about the nuclear power plant and the spider farm being next to each other.

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