Project Wolf Hunting Review: A Gorehound’s Delight in the Pacific Ocean

Kim Hong-sun’s Project Wolf Hunting suggests a Rube Goldberg machine of carnage, its moving parts greased by all the innards whose removal the human body tends not to survive. And aboard the cargo ship that serves as the film’s main setting, there are bodies aplenty. Some of them are ill-fated crew and two are medical staff, but the rest are criminals being extradited to Korea alongside the no-less-violent police officers brought in to escort them.

Things go wrong so quickly that there’s precious little time to establish who’s who in any particular detail. But it’s tough not to take particular notice of Jong-du (Seo In-guk), the criminal whose extensive tattoos make him look like he has scales. He moves with a reptilian body language to match, and we get to hear his lengthy rap sheet just in case the things he says about a guard’s daughter to provoke a beating aren’t reprehensible enough. There’s little doubt that he’s a monster, with his fiendish status reinforced during the grisly, surgical overthrow of the ship that he helps orchestrate. At one point, he eats a guard’s ear.

The sheer brutality of the mutiny manages to awaken something worse, a fearsome humanoid (Choi Guy-hwa) who’s being secretly transported under sedation in the bowels of the ship. Its eyelids are stapled shut like a corpse, but it can still see in heat vision to locate the crew and tear them apart bare-handed. For a film that all but begins with fluids dripping from near-constant fountains of arterial spray, this entity carries the film to a further level of ultraviolent mayhem, like dropping a Predator or a Terminator in the middle of Con Air.

That’s pretty much the film. Packing as much viscera as possible into tight quarters, Project Wolf Hunting operates as though other extreme East Asian efforts like The Sadness and The Night Comes for Us pose a challenge to be met, if not overcome. Though where the latter martial arts gorefest remained gruesomely inventive throughout its two-hour runtime, Project Wolf Hunting somewhat stagnates across a similar number of minutes. Those cargo ship corridors, after all, are only conducive to so many permutations of grievous bodily harm; a couple of flashbacks even transplant similar massacres to new locations once the ship’s fodder runs low.

But even so, there’s an admirably propulsive, single-minded sense of purpose to the film’s commitment to gore. Where its contemporaries might feel a little deficient for not exploring their concepts and characters to the fullest extent, Project Wolf Hunting can hardly be accused of straying far from its particularly outlandish wheelhouse. Kim’s film is dedicated above all else to the squelching and spurting of blood and the ripping apart of seemingly endless bodies, and it’s quite gleeful at delivering those grotesqueries.