Badland Hunters

After a major earthquake, Seoul has been transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland where civilization and law and order has all but collapsed.

Badland Hunters is a post-apocalyptic, bare-knuckle brawling, sci-if disaster movie, the directorial debut of Heo Myeong-haeng, who was Fight Choreographer on films like The Good The Bad and The Weird, and Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan, and it is the sequel to a film called Concrete Utopia, a movie which I’ve never heard of, and will probably never watch.

The best thing about this film is that stars Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee).

Don Lee plays Nam-san, a hunter. The most surprising thing about that is that he’s not a bounty hunter in the wastelands, or anything like that, like you’d expect, given the title, he’s just a regular hunter. He hunts the Komodo dragon alligator things in the badlands, and then he sells the meat to the locals. That’s it. That’s his life. That’s all that the title is referring to. Basically, calling this film Badlands Hunters is like if you were to make a film about a couple of guys from a rural area, who happen to enjoy the outdoors life, hunting, fishing, hiking, yadda, yadda, yadda… who find themselves forced by circumstances to be involved in the thwarting of some kind of “kidnappings and evil conspiracies” ruckus, and then you call the film… Turkey Hunters.

So, Badland Hunters takes place in the post-apocalyptic remnants of an earthquake-ravaged South Korea, where the survivors eke a semblance of a normal life out of the dust and rubble and ruin of what’s left of the city of Seoul. It’s the kind of film where gangs of swaggering bad guys, most of whom either have a mohawk or a pompadour, will suddenly roll into the flea market-looking dirt lot the locals call their town, all of them riding on cobbled-together dirt bikes or dune buggys, so that they can enjoy a Sunday afternoon of harassing the innocent townspeople, all while cackling evilly… which are the worst kind of post apocalyptic bad guys.

Luckily for these desert rat townies, and as we all know, if there’s one thing that Don Lee knows how to do… it’s beat the unholy shit out of some jerks, which he does a lot of here. The film is basically a showcase for Don Lee beating the shit out of a myriad of bad guys. If there’s a problem in this film that can be solved with a thunderous salvo of furious fisticuffs, then let me assure you… that is what’s gonna happen.

Unfortunately, those swaggering mohawks and pompadours all work for an evil doctor, whose evil plan is to turn people into evil immortals, even though it gives them these weird blistered rashes.

The evil doctor has an organization that serves him, and they’re based in the only apartment building that is still standing after the big earthquake. This organization goes out into the ruins, and lures all of the fresh-faced young people they can find back to the apartment building with promises of electricity, food, and running water, but when the fresh-faced youths get there… they’re forced to take part in the evil doctor’s experiments.

Even worse, if any of their family also made the trip with them, they must toil away in the basement, forced to keep the building functioning. And if any of them complain to the base officials about the endless work, or the fact that their fresh-faced youths have all disappeared after their appointments with the evil doctor, then the base officials simply march the complainers out into the Badlands, and kill them.

It’s an efficient system.

Or at least, it is, until the day they lure away a fresh-faced young woman that Nam-San happens to be sweet on, and also kill the young woman’s beloved grandma.

You can pretty much guess what happens after that…

That’s right… punching.

And this time, he ain’t stopping until every bad guy in the badlands has been punched… a whole bunch.

In a film that seems more like a tv pilot than a real movie, Badland Hunters is a good example of supreme cheese. It’s definitely fair to call this film “bombastic,” because it is, especially if you mean both the actual definition of the word, and also what you assume the definiton is when you first hear the word.

In the end, Badland Hunters is just fine. It’s not good. It’s not great. It is kind of fun to see a type of film that we more commonly see from Hollywood, but presented through the lens of a different cultural perspective, but really, this is a film that is meant to be watched casually, like while you’re folding clothes maybe.

It’s decent, but nothing special.