R-POINT

By: BRIAN THOMAS
Review Date: Saturday, February 18, 2006

The war movie and the supernatural horror movie rarely cross paths. It may be because War is Hell, and that's enough horror for any story. There's not much a horror movie can do beyond the shock material found in APOCALYPSE NOW or SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Who's afraid of ghosts in a place where people are constantly killing each other en masse? Since ALIENS, it's become common to see soldiers blasting away at alien monsters, but few films have attempted to mix military action with supernatural chills.

R-POINT is one of those few, and it does so somewhat successfully. After having spent three years in combat in Viet Nam, Lt. Choi (Kam Woo-sung of SPIDER FOREST) is punished for losing too many men by an order to take charge of a platoon of soldiers culled from the ranks of VD casualties on one last mission. They're sent to a region designated R-Point, far from enemy action, to search for another company of Korean troops that were sent in six months before and have long been out of contact.

After defeating a small group of locals in a nearby bamboo forest, the platoon moves in into the middle of R-Point, which a tombstone says used to be a lake used as a burial ground for locals slain by the Chinese and then filled in. They camp amidst dense fog, but in the morning find it's lifted enough to reveal an old abandoned mansion nearby. Resting in the spooky ruined mansion at night and searching through the surrounding wilds by day gets on everyone's nerves, especially when some of them report seeing other soldiers they can't find. When a Private Chung fails to report for guard duty, they find him hanging from the second story. However, on reporting the suicide to command via radio, Choi is told that Chung belonged to the group they are looking for, and none of the men can remember seeing him before they got to R-Point. The haunting continues, with one of the men seeing an old friend who was supposed to be among the missing, radio messages come in from a French company long dead, and Choi seeing the specter of a female enemy he recently had to kill.

A huge hit in Korea, R-POINT is unfortunately unable to avoid some of the clichés of both genres it mines. Soldiers who show off photos of loved ones back home are surely doomed, and several times blood slowly seeps from places that shouldn't bleed in accompaniment to ominous music. Kong Su-chang, screenwriter of the superb thriller TELL ME SOMETHING, ought to have excised these clunkers in favor of more original twists. He fares better at recreating the 1972 military milieu, and the included Making-Of documentary featurettes show us the pains that were taken in creating this authenticity, with the cast going through boot camp, etc. But the film's greatest asset is its Cambodian haunted house location, a stark ruin in the middle of nowhere that creates the impression of a place beyond the world we know. It's this Twilight Zone quality that sticks with you afterward, and it probably wouldn't have been half as effective without the attention to detail shown in the other aspect of the film.


The featurettes on the disc focus more on showing behind-the-scenes footage to give an impression of the shooting atmosphere than to provide specific details. Separate featurettes on production design and special effects are more driven by interview. But for more info on the production period, take in the commentrak with writer/director Kong, producer Choi Kang-hyuk and location supervisor Kim Wan-shik. Though the conversation natural tends toward telling stories about what happened when certain scenes were shot, there's eventually some discussion of artistic intent. They're also very critical of many scenes, complaining that they couldn't get the locations they wanted or had to battle the elements. Though one would expect that the movie was such a big hit in South Korea because of the tense military situation they've lived in all their lives, Kong appears to have been aiming for entertainment and a more universal experience first and foremost. Whatever its intent, R-POINT makes a point of making an evil supernatural force indistinguishable from the effects of war itself, meaning that it plays quite well for any audience touched by war.

Copyright © 2006 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.
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