re:mote voices

Title: R-Point
Cast: Woo-seong Kam, Byung-ho Son, Tae-kyung Oh, Won-sang Park, Seon-gyun Lee, Nae-sang Ahn, Byeong-cheol Kim, Kyeong-ho Jeon, Yeong-dong Mun
Director: Su-chang Kong

1972, Vietnam, and the radio stutters into life - Mad Dog 3, Mad Dog 3 to HQ - help us we are being massacred. The soldiers of Mad Dog 3 disappeared 6 months ago; the only "survivor" lies in a hospital bed and swears that the rest of his company are dead. So is it the keeps radioing for help?

After the latest incident, a jinxed officer is assigned the mission of going to R-Point to find out what happened to Mad Dog 3. The rest of his group made up by soldiers who would have been sent back to Korea at the end of their tour, if they weren't being treated for the syphillis they caught while in Vietnam.

The area of Vietnam covered by "R-Point" is regarded as sacred and holy by the locals, and they won't enter it. The soldiers find ramshackle temples, mass graves, and the warning from the times when the Chinese killed an entire town. From the start, strange things happen, each event abrading morale.

Despite the trailers for R-Point suggesting all kinds of ghosts and zombies, the film is more of a psychological horror. Shapes in the dark, figures drifting out of the night to go about business as usual, leaving chaos in their wake. The sound is cranked up, so that some of the film's most intense sections result more from the sonic assault than what is actually going on on-screen. Like a lot of the Asian horror films that make it over here, there is the obligatory woman in white - her presence never really explained past a token "well obviously" clue.

R-Point is a decent enough film; the characters are kept on edge, and progressively worn away. But it isn't really a film filled with suspense or surprises - from the start we have a good idea of what happened here, and from that we know that this is a bad place. So none of the usual, bad things happen, clues appear, we learn the big bad thing that happened that left a big bad thing stain, or whatever you want to call it.

R-Point is a film from South Korea, which apparently has already been signed up for an American remake - which given the American connection with Vietnam, and even an encounter with American soldiers in the film, should translate quite smoothly. The film is showing as part of the 3rd annual Asia Extreme season put together by Tartan distributors and Cineworld cinemas. Not particularly extreme, not particularly special, but watchable enough.