What to Stream: South Korean Monster Mash in 'The Host'
The Host (2006) Netflix and iTunes
The Basics: A delirious creature feature directed by South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho
If You Liked: Jaws, Godzilla, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
The Nugget: A hungry monster crawls out of Seoul’s Han River and proceeds to lay waste to South Korea’s capital city.
After the well-received 2003 procedural Memories of Murder, The Host vaulted Bong onto the international stage, starting with a splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. (It also set the director on the path to helming his first English-language film, Snowpiercer, which is in theaters now.) Unafraid to mix in some silliness and social commentary amid the seriousness of a rampaging aquatic monster, The Host is, in some ways, an even better Godzilla remake than the recent Hollywood version. The human characters are certainly more interesting in Bong’s movie, starting with our unlikely hero, dunderheaded snack bar proprietor Park Gang-doo (Song Kang-ho), who loses his daughter in the creature’s initial attack and spends the rest of the movie trying to get her back. If you think America isn’t producing monster movies like it used to, that’s because Korea’s got the market cornered.
Photo credit: Everett
