31 Nights of Halloween Horror part 28 - Train to Busan

Train to Busan
118 mins.
Dir. Sang-ho Yeon
2016/South Korea

Take one train, add in some 28 Days Later, buy a ticket for World War Z and save a seat for Snowpiercer and you have what resembles Train to Busan, but is better then all those films mentioned.  It has been all the rage since it was released last year.  I finally sat down to watch it and if you have been putting it off, I highly recommend you don't any longer.  This one does not disappoint.

Not zombies in the traditional sense that they are rotted corpses of the deceased hungry for your flesh.  It is more of a viral infection like 28 Days Later, that comes on fast and is transferred by a bite, so they do want to eat you.  And they are fast, fast like World War Z zombies where they just run over each other and let nothing get in there way.  But it is not a copy of either of these movies.  It still manages to add some new ideas and above all actually has characters you can care about instead of waiting to see get eaten.

Our main characters in this film are Seok-woo a divorced workaholic father trying to raise his young daughter Soo-an.  It's her birthday and he buys her a Wii, which she doesn't seem to excited about and when he asks why she points out that he already bought her one for Children's Day.  (Apparently a holiday lacking in America that I wish existed when I was a kid.)  So we can see he is pretty neglectful and asks what does she want.  She says to visit her mother tomorrow in Busan, about an hour train ride away.

And off we go on a fast paced train ride to hell.  From this point the movie is non-stop, with only a few moments to catch your breath, but just barely.  Right before the train doors close an "infected" woman runs onto the train and it is not long before she "turns" and bites someone, who bites someone, who bites someone... and now we have a whole train car filled with ravenous creatures that want to tear you apart.

At almost two hours, this movie is a fast paced non-stop action thriller.  You would think this would be hard to pull off with one locale on a train and really one agenda, get away from the crazy people trying to eat you.  While most of it is on a train, there are a times where the trains comes to a station and they try and get off only to find, that station is fucked and it is back on the train to try someplace else safe.  I can't recall the last time I watched a zombie film and I actually cared about the characters.  Great character development, that you actually feel sympathy and pain when someone gets bit and they know they are going to die.

Not high in the gore department, in fact I don't think you really see and chomping on limbs or organs just the act of biting.  But the infected do look cool, with their glazed over white eyes and protruding veins on their bodies.  And of course there is that damn twisted contorted walk that only the Asians know how to do.

First time live-action director Sang-ho Yeon, who previously had only done animated features prior to this really knocks it out of the park with Train to Busan.  He made a film called Seoul Station that is animated feature taking place a day before The Train to Busan story starts.  Great pacing, great characters, beautifully shot, never a dull moment as soon as the film starts until its closing scene.  I can go and on about this film, but really you just need to see it for yourself.  Train to Busan is a fast paced non-stop action packed infected fuck fest.  You can't go wrong.  And as a someone who commutes everyday on a train to work, should something like this ever happen.  We are fucked, cause most commuters are idiots who are just in your way.