The Witch: Part 2. The Other One

The sole survivor of a secret research facility, a mysterious young woman is taken in by a sister and a brother, who soon realize the girl is not only very powerful, but that she is being pursued by some equally as powerful people, and now they are all in grave danger.

I know what you’re thinking right away… Is this film’s title fucking with us? Is it meant to be a joke? Because when you say it out loud, especially if you do it in a dramatic tone of voice, it certainly sounds like a joke. Plus, the poster says: “The New Witch Returns“ …What? What the hell does that mean? How exactly would a NEW witch return anywhere? Shouldn’t it be “arrives” maybe? Or is this all just the result of the title having been translated to English from Korean?

Short answer? I don’t know.

I bet I can also guess what your next question probably is… this film is a Part 2, do you need to see Part 1 to understand what’s going on?

Hmmm… good question. Really, I don’t think it matters. Now, have I actually watched the first one? No, I have not. Does this make the second one much more confusing? …Yes. Very much so, yes. Would watching the first one maybe alleviate this confusion? Probably, sure. But to be fair, I don’t actually know.

From what I understand, Part 1 is pretty much just the Korean version of Stephen King’s Firestarter, but bloodier, while Part 2 is more of a comic book superhero movie from the 90s, a lot of dark shadows, chrome, and janky CGI, y’know… kind of like the Fox X-Men franchise, but also Korean, and also much bloodier. But all that shit aside, here's the reason why it doesn’t really matter whether you’ve seen the first film or not, it's because apparently, writer and director Park Hoon-Jung just ignores the first film entirely, and goes ahead and tells a whole new story with pretty much an entirely new cast. So, your mileage may vary. Do what you want.

Either way, this one was pretty awesome.

All you really need to know is a mysterious young woman with superpowers escapes from a secret black science lab, and a bunch of different people are looking for her. All of those people are somehow related to the mysterious young woman, or they’re from the same program, or they might be a clone of her, or she’s a clone of them. Whatever it is, they all have superpowers too. Then they fight, and there’s blood. Lots of blood. There’s also a bit of teenage drama too. Also, this is basically what happened in the first film, from what I can gather. Not exactly, but close enough. And just fyi, that story apparently involved the twin of the mysterious young woman who stars in this film. So she also had superpowers.

Finally… there’s clearly going to be a Part 3. If I was a betting man, I’d guess it’s going to be called: The Witch: Part 3. Both Of Them.

The movie opens with a bus full of high school age kids on a class trip. They’re all having a good time, as the kids do. But then the bus takes a different route, ending up at a quarry, where one of the young women is abducted, and the rest of the kids are all murdered, and their deaths are made to look like the result of a crash.

The young woman wakes up on a stretcher in a lab, and is told by a pair of twin women doctors, who might both be named Dr. Baek, or at least one of them is, that she is here because she’s pregnant with twins, and then they mysteriously add that those twins will one day be very important…

In the present day, a young woman known as Ark 1 escapes from a secret laboratory after killing all of the soldiers and scientists there. She gets lost in the forest, and is almost hit by a speeding minivan full of thugs, who are in the employ of a gangster named Yong-doo. The thugs screech to a halt, and back up, pulling up next to Ark 1, and decide… y’know what? Fuck it. Let’s kidnap her.

There is no explanation for this, and honestly seems a bit greedy, as they have already kidnapped a young woman named Kyung-hee, who is sitting in the back seat, because she refuses to give her house to Yong-doo. Along the way, one of the thugs gets a bit handsy with Ark 1, and she basically murders all of them with some high speed super kung fu, which causes the minivan to crash. Stumbling from the crash, Ark 1 passes out.

Kyung-hee takes the girl with her, and calls her uncle for help.

Kyung-hee’s uncle is a disgrace, a drunk, and a veterinarian, and now he’s a back-alley doctor. He performs surgery on the passed out Ark 1, removing the myriad of strange experimental devices from her skin. Afterwards, Kyung-hee ends up taking Ark 1 with her back to her house, where she lives with her brother, Dae-gil. He’s mad at Kyung-hee for being away from the family for so long, and because of the fact that she has only recently returned home because their father was murdered, so he is resentful towards her, feeling like she had abandoned him.

Then Dae-gil meets Ark 1, and young love blooms.

But that night, Yong-doo and his gang all show up at the house. They threaten Kyung-hee and demand that she give him her father's property. Yong-doo also reveals that he was the one who murdered their father. This makes both Kyung-hee and Dae-gil really angry and Yong-doo's thugs rough them up.

And as a result, Ark 1 beats the unholy shit out of all of the henchmen with her incredible speed and strength. She punches one guy through a barn. Yong-doo flees in terror.

Meanwhile, the wheelchair-bound Dr. Baek receives a visit from Jang, the head of a secret institute that is so secret the film doesn’t even tell us what it’s called, or it assumes that we remember when they mentioned it in the first film.

The pair have a bit of a professional rivalry.

Both of them are still looking for Ja-yoon, who is the main character from the first film The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, which I really think should've been called The Witch: Part 1. The First One.

Anyway, Dr. Baek and Jang are both a bit concerned, now that two dangerously super-powered young women have escaped from their secret torture labs, and not only because of all the potential trouble they could be in should their secret black science experiments be revealed to the world, but also because they fear what may happen should the pair of girls reunite. Because it turns out, the girl from the first film, and Ark 1, are twins. Presumably the same twins that were mentioned in the very beginning of this film.

Jang tells Dr. Baek that he has deployed a tactical team to deal with Ark 1. His tac-team is made up of four super powered teens, three girls and one boy, all of whom are clearly psychopaths, who enjoy killing with their super powers, with the team’s leader being a particularly vicious little shit.

Determined to keep Jang from being the one to collect Ark 1, Dr. Baek calls in a pair of super-soldiers. One of the super-soldiers is Jo-hyeon, a whiskey-soaked, foul-mouthed tomboy, while the other is a big bearded Australian dude, whose name I didn’t catch, but he’s the only white guy in the film, so y’know… Anyway, Dr. Baek gives them a tracking device, and sends them after Ark 1.

Meanwhile, Yong-doo, not happy with how badly he and his guys got their asses kicked by a tiny young woman, tortures Kyung-hee's uncle for more information about the girl. He then calls his bosses to complain.

Meanwhile, Kyung-hee and Dae-gil take Ark 1 to the grocery store and she basically loses her shit with joy over all the free samples, and just goes to town on anything with a toothpick stuck in it, all while filling their cart with every snack item she sees. But then, Kyung-hee discovers that her uncle is injured and goes to help him.

Meanwhile, Yong-doo returns to his office and finds himself set upon by Jang's squad of super powered teenage psychopaths, and they threaten to squash his head if he doesn’t reveal the location of Ark 1.

When Kyung-hee returns to the car after seeing to her Uncle,, she finds that Jo-hyeon and the Australian guy are waiting for her. They show her security footage of Ark 1 killing everyone while escaping the lab, and tell Kyung-hee that Ark 1 is potentially very dangerous. They ask for her help bringing her in.

Kyung-hee arrives home, intending to leave with Dae-gil before the big fireworks show takes place, because she knows that's the moment when Jo-hyeon and the Australian will arrive, but before that can happen… Yong-doo arrives with his gang of thugs. Jang's squad of super powered teenage psychopaths also show up. and then Jo-hyeon and the Australian do too. As the fireworks start, a member of Jo-hyeon’s support team fires a couple of rockets at Ark 1, and that's when shit gets real at Kyung-hee's Dad's house.

After that, there’s a ton of super-powered fighting and super-powered jumping and super-powered punching and all sort of explosions too, both of fire and of blood. There's so slo-mo and a bunch of cool posing. A lot of people die. It's both sad and awesome.

Finally, Ark 1 has to wreck shop.

After pretty much everyone is dead except Ark 1, Goo Ja-yoon arrives. If you haven’t seen the first one, you’d have no idea who she is, but she's the girl from the first film. She then lays out what will be the point of the third film, and asks Ark 1 to go with her. Meanwhile, Dr. Baek senses that the sisters have been reunited, and she’s like “oh, crap.” Finally, in a post-credits scene, we see that Jo-hyeon and the Australian have managed to survive the chaos, and they are then joined by more super-powered people that I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen before, and they all agree to track down Ja-yoon and Ark 1 in Part 3.

The End.

The Witch: Part Two. The Other One is a pretty good time. Is it a horror film? No. Not at all. I don't know if I heard that it was somewhere, or if I just made that up in my head, but much like 40 Acres, it is definitely not a horror film. It's more of a sci-fi superhero story, an X-Men story.

And while it is a little confusing, that’s mostly due to the speed of the myriad introductions and plot lines, and the way the film assumes that you know what's going on. But I also found that, if you just roll with it, you’ll be fine. And honestly, in the end, the story line is pretty simple and straightforward, Ark 1 is on the run, and everyone is after her. There’s a decent B-story with Kyung-hee and Dae-gil in a classic Wild West-style plot to protect their dead dad’s land from some murderous varmints, and Ark 1 fits in with that in a very satisfying way. Meanwhile, Jo-Hyeon and the big Australian are really good together, so I was glad to see that they didn't die, and Jang’s tactical squad of super-powered teenage psychopaths are great bad guys too, so I was also glad to see that they did die.

Sure, the action is a little too jittery, and it’s definitely too busy, and sometimes it’s hard to follow because of the rubbery CGI, and because it’s too dark, so all you can really say for sure is that someone got torn apart and there was a lot of blood and a bunch of squishy noises, but still… it’s fun.

It’s definitely no Blade, but this film definitely feels of that era, that fun and wild and random, out-of-left field comic book-like action movie that would show up at the tail end of the summer season for a week or two, or would maybe get dumped into the post-holiday doldrums market of February, with a weirdly complex lore and a lot of black outfits and trench coats. In a nutshell, this is like the Korean version of Underworld, but bloodier, obviously, and it doesn't have any vampires or werewolves in it, of course, and also it's not dumb. (I still can't believe that the vampire overlord turned out to be a bad guy in that movie!) So, at the very least, it’s worth checking out just for that kind of nostalgic feeling.

Ahh… the 90s? Remember that shit? God, it sucked.

Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll ever bother watching the first film in this franchise, just like I’m pretty sure I can probably guess exactly what’s going to happen in the next film, but I also know that eventually it will come out, and when it does, it will make for a nice little lazy Sunday watch, just like this one did.

Oh yeah, also… “witch” is what they call super-powered people. I don’t know why.