Flinthart’s review: Written and directed by Hongsun (also frequently Hong-Seon) Kim, this 2022 scifi-action-horror flick is downright grotesquely violent. If you’re keen on massive gore, blood-splatter and clinically depicted acts of hideous brutality, you won’t be disappointed with Project Wolf Hunting. However if that’s not your thing, you may want to keep a stiff drink on hand to watch this piece.

Now, I don’t mind cinematic violence and blood. I guess I was about five when my dad was taking me to ludicrously bloody samurai flicks in Hawaii… but there’s a real difference, I assure you. The point of the blood and gore in those old samurai epics was less about fan service and more about depicting the lethality of samurai blade-work. But watching an escaping prisoner chew off the ear of a mostly helpless guard is just grisly. Yeah, sure: the prisoner’s a Real Bad Guy. But we kinda knew that already from his obnoxious tattoos.

Getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

Okay, fine. There’s a quick opening sequence in Project Wolf Hunting in which we discover that South Korea has just set up an extradition process with the Philippines, where a lot of Korean criminals have been imprisoned/hiding/whatever. The prisoners are due to be flown back to Korea on a commercial flight – right up until an aggrieved victim of one of the criminals carries out a revenge suicide-bombing attack at the airport, making confetti of rather a lot of innocents in the process.

This sequence exists to convince us why South Korea finds it necessary to move its next lot of Seoul’s Most Deeply Unwanted via a cargo ship (the Frontier Titan), marginally converted to carry its load of violent ne’er-do-wells plus the necessary collateral damage police guards. Yeah. Of course, raging psychopath Park Jong-Doo (played under a heavy load of fake tats by the remarkably pretty Seo In-Guk, who honestly looks like he should be fronting a K-Pop boy band, which is probably why they went for the tattoo thing in the first place) has got an escape all lined up. So, of course, not too long after the ship leaves Phillipine waters, the mayhem starts.

So far, so ultra-violent Con Air on a cargo boat. But! Somewhere down belowdecks on the Frontier Titan is a hidden section accessed by the sad, frightened doctor assigned to the task of medicking a strange, corpse-like figure on a bed of ice watched over by a couple of science nerds. The doc has to give this strange body regular shots of sedatives, which is weird because from the outset it looks like embalming fluid would be more useful.

Then the escape starts. Blood goes everywhere. Hapless police detectives are smashed with hammers (in a not-at-all subtle nod to the infamous hammer hallway fight from Oldboy, a far better Korean movie), stabbed, shot, beaten, etc etc etc. Communications to the overseers on the mainland are duly cut, and it becomes apparent that this whole show has been set up well in advance. That is, except for the fact that there’s a large contingent of those mainland overseeing types who appear to be completely uninterested in the vicious crims, and far more concerned with the corpse-guy. (Who later gets called ‘Alpha,’ played with appropriately relentless physicality by Gwi-Hwa Choi.)

And indeed, so they should be. For as the remaining police officers stage a desperate counter-offensive to retake the boat and the bloody fray rages, some of that blood splatters down a drain and drips onto – yep, you guessed it: Alpha.

And does he come to life like a Hammer Horror Dracula as a result? Of course he does. But he turns out to be some sort of bizarro Frankenstein’s monster-cum-Terminator, his various limbs stitched together and his eyes stapled shut. Not that this slows him down. On the contrary, he’s super-fast, horrifically strong, and even blood-thirstier than Boy-Band-Psycho with the tattoos.

I mean: There’s a LOT of blood.

From my point of view, the only really interesting thing about the plot was the question of who was supposed to be the actual protagonist. There were candidates: the perky young female police detective Lee Da-Yeon (played competently by Jung So-Min) who figures out there’s an escape going on before anybody else on her team. Or the grizzled senior detective who lost a daughter to Psychotatts Boyband and tried to beat him to death on the docks before boarding. Heck, even the doctor might have been a candidate… except they all JUST KEPT DYING!

It’s a rare film that’s willing to kill off pretty much every named character in it as well as a bunch who never managed to get names in the first place. But that’s Project Wolf Hunting for you: violent, evil criminals stage a bloody escape on a cargo ship and fall afoul of an even more violent and evil unstoppable murdermaker… and just about everyone who gets so much as a line of dialogue winds up in the meatgrinder.

Spoilers: There is actually something like a protagonist. See it turns out that ‘Alpha’ is the result of a World-War 2 era Japanese experiment to create a genetically enhanced supersoldier. (More spoilers: did NOT end well for the Japanese experimenters.) Now, a technology like that is hardly gonna be abandoned just because the prototype single-mindedly murders anyone and everyone who ventures into reach. No sir! And so the mysterious Aeon Genetics has moved forward, creating some kind of a serum and more super-soldiers and a super-mid-level manager and some kind of a super-CEO/Boss guy (who only appears at one end of a phone call, and he’s kinda busy so we don’t see much of him and I’m actually grateful for that since he appears to be getting… errr… serviced by a young chap who comes to a bad end).

With all these supersoldier types running around, you won’t be surprised to hear that there’s one in the cast of criminals aboard the Frontier Titan. I won’t say who it is, because identifying him is (as I mentioned) one of the few amusements offered by Project Wolf Hunting other than the unrelenting Gore-O-Vision stuff. But in the end, it comes down to Secret Criminal Supersoldier going 1v1 against Secret Criminal Super-Mid-Level-Manager guy and literally everybody else on board the ship is not just dead, but splattered, battered, dismembered, chewed up, spat out, and stomped flat. And occasionally stacked in the freezer.

The very final scenes of the film are reserved for a few shots that suggest the film-makers are up for a sequel if anybody wants to cover their blood-effects budget. It’s not going to be me, though. I didn’t mind the story, and the World War II Terminator guy was a pretty nice move, sure. I also like the sub-story slowly emerging through the film about Aeon Genetics, and the origin of Alpha, and the modern-day super-soldier folk.

But I’m not nearly as interested in balls-out real-time Olympic Sport Vivisection as Hongsun Kim and his crew of monochrome Jackson Pollock massacre loonies.

Intermission!

• Blood.
• Oh look. More blood.
• Huh. I think he chewed that guy’s ear off.
• Oh, and did he just smash a hole in that guy’s skull using handcuffs?
• Hammers. Right. Because guns just aren’t splatterpunk enough.
• She’s dead? Huh. I thought she was gonna make it to the end.
• Oh, he’s dead too? And him? Wow.
• Oh, they’re all dead. And those other guys too.
• Hey! Here comes a chopper full of soldiers!
• Oh wait. They’re dead too….