Monstrum (2018) Review

Monstrum (2018) Review

The plague terrorises villagers and fear runs rampant in the streets. When rumours of a fabled and ferocious beast roaming Mount Inwangsan begin to spread, fear soon turns to panic. To quell the rising terror, King Jungjong (Hee-soon Park – The Scam) brings his most trusted general, Yoon-gyeom (Myung-Min Kim – Six Flying Dragons) back from retirement to hunt the monstrous Monstrum – which threatens both palace and people.

Joined by royal court officer Heo (Woo-sik Choi – Parasite), his daughter Myeong (Hyeri Lee – Record of Youth), and loyal right-hand man Seong-han (In-kwon Kim – My Way), Yoon-gyeom embarks on a quest to find the legendary monster. More than a simple tale of man versus beast, Monstrum considers the origins of myths and murderous monsters. Is the creature real… or a figment of mass imagination?

My hopes were high for MONSTRUM, I love creature features and having the action set in the 1500s tickled my excitable sensibilities even further. For all the visual invention on display everything is let down by a narrative that it is just so predictable, so much so that it wasn’t too long into watching it that I thought ‘yep, see it all before’ and consequently my interest waned.

Characterisation opts for standard cliches but then as this is probably aimed at a younger demographic, that’s there for pure escapism only, there probably wasn’t a need to beef out the personalities. You’ll see nothing new here and the chances are you may end up switching off, not because it’s crap but simply because it’s not offering anything new and it doesn’t help that the film’s first thirty minutes are rather dull and a bit of a chore to sit through.