HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 44
6th of 6 Asian horror films

I'm still shaking my head a little about the fact that this movie, based on its synopsis and all the positive reviews I read and even the director who I'm quite a fan of, just kinda bored me a bit?

I'm not saying all the reviews I read were positive, but the positive ones really made this sound like something I'd love. And they're not even making false claims about it. It is hyperviolent and basically one fight scene after another from start to finish, and yeah, it's all pretty insane. But somehow it's just not very entertaining.

This movie made me think a lot about that recent indie horror film, Antrum, in that it shares at least one of its fatal flaws. As much as I salute the economising from a production which clearly didn't have a lot of pennies to rub together, at the end of the day, this vision of hell (or a gateway to hell in the case of Versus?) really just looks like a forest - and a pretty non-descript forest at that. So basically, this movie is a bunch of guys wandering around a forest shouting at each other and then fighting. And although a lot of the fight choreography is quite good, at the end of the day, it's not really a patch on, say, a standard Hong Kong kung-fu film - and we've been tolerating non-existent plots just so we can watch those fights for years.

Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for this, and if it was shorter I might have managed to be more indulgent of it. But the nearly two-hour run time for this film really dragged for me.