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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: DD 2.0
Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1
Languages: Korean
Subtitles: English, Chinese (T/S)
Region Code: ALL
Year Made: 2008
Running Time: 120
Release Date: 07/07/2008
Get yourself ready for a two-hour thriller that takes place among the guard posts on the southern side of the demilitarized zone. Director Kong Soo-chang is back with his second feature "The Guard Post". Kong's film — released last Thursday — focuses on a mysterious massacre that occurs in the DMZ one rainy day. Twenty armed soldiers at a guard post have been mysteriously killed. One is left alive, but unconscious. The Defense Ministry dispatches an investigation team. Sergeant Major Noh Seong-gyu (Cheon Ho-jin) is given 24 hours to find the body of Yu Jeong-woo (Jo Hyeon-jae), who was in command of The Guard Post. Kong's previous feature, "R-Point", also takes place in a military setting. It's about a Korean unit dispatched to the Vietnam War that receives a strange radio transmission from a group of soldiers previously thought missing in action. "I served in the army under Korea's military regime", Kong said. "During that time, the government was in total control".
Kong was a Korean language and literature major who enjoyed keeping a diary while in the military service. The government constantly inspected that diary. Kong wanted to share his observations of social irregularities in the army on the big screen. "Young soldiers are pushed to the limit in the army", Kong said. "These are stories that go behind the extremes". Kong wanted the film to look as real as possible. "That's why no female characters were cast — there are no women at the guard posts", Kong said. The film's studio set was created to look as realistic as possible. Since The Guard Post is an isolated area, the film crew couldn't even visit the zone for the film. But Kong had once visited the post while serving in the military. His assistant director and several members of the film crew had also served in the military at guard posts. To supplement their memories, Kong arranged an interview with a former guard post sergeant and collected information from photos.
South Korea's meandering border with the North is one of the world's most surreal places, a heavily armed space still trapped in the Cold War. Park Chan-wook's JSA depicted the tension and close proximity of Southern and Northern soldiers at Panmunjeom, a former truce village that is now divided cleanly in half. But elsewhere along the DMZ, the most prominent structures are guard posts (GP for short): large, heavily armored self-contained forts that are strung along the border like pearls on a necklace. North Korea also maintains its own guard posts, which form pairs with those on the South.
The atmosphere in the DMZ (the term "de-militarized zone" is a bit of a joke) is tense. The military sends its strongest soldiers to this area, and imposes the harshest degree of discipline on them. Shots are occasionally exchanged across the border. Suicides or mysterious deaths have been known to occur among the men stationed there, and there was a recent case of a solider in a guard post who became mentally unhinged and slaughtered many of his fellow recruits
What better place to set a supernatural gore fest? GP506 is a guard post that has fallen strangely silent (each GP is required to send a signal to headquarters every half hour; if the signal is not received, troops are sent in). A neighboring contingent of soldiers enters the post and finds blood on the walls and grossly dismembered bodies strewn in every direction. A military inspector arrives to investigate, and at first the deaths seem to be the result of some inner conflict within the group. The one surviving soldier is severely traumatized and seems unwilling to talk. Eventually, however, more disturbing clues emerge.
Kong Su-chang received both critical praise and commercial success with his debut R-Point (2004), about a company of Korean soldiers serving in Vietnam who are sent to a remote location to investigate a vanished squadron. The Guard Post would appear at first glance to be a virtual redux, with only the setting changed, but it's surprising how different the two films feel. R-Point was a slow-moving, chilling mystery with a slightly arty feel to it. The Guard Post is a roller coaster that wears its genre credentials more prominently on its sleeve, and despite its setting, offers a less developed political subtext. Unfortunately R-Point's greatest strengths -- its pitch-perfect ensemble acting and narrative coherence -- are reproduced far less successfully in the latter film.
The making of The Guard Post turned out to be more of an adventure than the filmmakers hoped. Midway through production, a spreading sense of crisis in the Korean film industry, together with unrelated trouble at the film's production company, caused the film's main investors to back out and shooting to ground to a halt. It appeared for some time that the film would never be finished, but eventually distributor Showbox stepped in and re-started the project.
Viewers beware: The Guard Post is gory! Brains, rotting flesh, self-mutilation -- this movie goes the extra mile (the poor woman sitting next to me at the press screening seemed to only barely make it through the film). Whereas R-Point had sort of a crossover appeal for people who don't like horror films, The Guard Post seems intended more explicitly for fans of the genre.
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