On April 5, the fantastic horror series «Parasyte: Gray». This is a South Korean adaptation of the popular manga «Parasyte» by Hitoshi Iwaaki. In the review below, we will tell you what kind of infection has attacked humanity this time and whether the concept of the original source material looks too strange on the movie screen.
Genre fantasy horror, action movie
Director Yong Sang-ho
Starring Jeong Seo-ni, Koo Kyo-hwan, Lee Jong-hyun, Kwon Hye-hyo, Kim In-kwon
Premiere Netflix
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb
A vibrant music festival is in full swing. Happy young people are rocking out on the dance floor to the DJ’s hot tracks. Suddenly, like a summer rain, strange rambutan fruits begin to fall from the sky, and vile worm-like creatures crawl out of them. One of them crawls into the ear of a fashionable guy in leather pants, and in a minute the latter ceases to be the subject of everyone’s attention — he turns into a horrible monster with tentacles instead of a head, stabbing people to death.
Meanwhile, a young girl, Jeong Shui-in, works as a cashier in a supermarket. There, a customer dissatisfied with the service makes a scene, and when he doesn’t get what he wants, he leaves the store with the promise of killing everyone to hell. Later, the vindictive brawler attempts to fulfill his promise, but mysteriously dies instead of the victim. Jong is left with nothing more than a fright.
Finally, there are several other important characters in the story, including the shotgun-toting warrior Choi Chun Kyung, who leads a special force called «Team Gray». They search for mysterious creatures that take over human bodies and destroy them. To find the enemy’s lair, a high-tech bucket was put on one of the captured parasites.
At first glance, the synopsis and the look of the local soil may seem like a lot of nonsense. But it’s worth remembering the original source — the cult manga «Parasyte» by Hitoshi Iwaaki, which actually offered such a bizarre body horror. To realize it, the creators had to resort to obvious computer graphics, so in view of all the above, the series looks more like a dark superhero story, or another episode of Paul Anderson’s late «Resident Evil» than a gruesome Carpenter-esque body horror.
While the protagonist of the original work was an ordinary Japanese schoolboy, and the space worm had to be content, strange as it may sound, with the boy’s hand, in the Netflix adaptation, an ordinary South Korean girl comes to the fore. Together with the intruder in her body, she forms a tandem like Eddie Brock and Venom.
«Parasyte: The Grey» is hardly an extremely engaging story that you can’t look away from. For a comic book movie that is far from monumental, there is too much talk, and when it finally comes to action, the cameraman is immediately seized with an epileptic fit.
In the context of the battle scenes, the authors do not show any originality of thought or at least diversity: the shot is either a banal shooting of monsters, as in any Hollywood zombie action movie, or fights of the latter, which look very bad. Still, you expect something more from the director and screenwriter of «Train to Busan».
On the other hand, closer to the climax, the authors manage to place accents on the characters in such a way that the plot arouses restrained but genuine curiosity. The stakes are raised, the tension is growing, and the iron aunt with the shotgun is more determined than ever. And manga fans will surely appreciate the episodic appearance of one familiar character in the ending. In fact, it was primarily for their sake that the whole thing was conceived.