Wickedly sardonic and fiercely fiendish in its perky presentation...a smart and simmering creature feature that crackles with percolating weirdness and wonderment.
Comment
03/11/07
The Host (2007)
92
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:141
Fresh:130
Rotten:11
Average Rating:7.7/10
Consensus: As populace pleasing as it is intellectually satisfying, The Host combines scares, laughs, and satire into a riveting, monster movie.
Runtime: 1 hr 59 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
US Box Office: $2,010,000
Synopsis: The talk of the 2006 Cannes International Film Festival, THE HOST, the latest film from critically acclaimed visionary director BONG Joon-ho, has already garnered a substantial amount of... [More]
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Byun Hee-bong, Bae Hae-il, Bae Doo-na
Director: Oh Bong-Joon
Reviews for The Host
61 - 80 (sorted by date; Australian critics are listed first)
A creature feature of a different stripe. An oddly funny, scary, politically potent tale.
03/10/07
[A] scary-funny romp.
03/10/07
Bong still offers a powerful rejoinder to his Hollywood counterparts: Anything you can do, I can do better.
03/10/07
A great monster, strong performances and unexpected humor.
03/10/07
You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll jump, you’ll ask Hollywood for your money back. Seek it out.
03/10/07
Top CriticRetains a quirky charm that cannot be discounted. Recommended not just for what it achieves, but for what it attempts to.
03/10/07
Bong's supreme achievement is that he has made his many messages fun.
03/09/07
If this madly entertaining movie has a fault, it's that it's too ingenious for the genre it ostensibly inhabits.
03/09/07
What a pleasure to watch an ambitious horror film that not only frightens but also surprises and engages us completely with its artful shifting of tones.
03/09/07
Top CriticBoon's film is both funny and heartbreaking, a supremely confident mix of political satire, free-floating paranoia, fractured family dynamics and the kind of comedy that regularly reconfigures itself into tragedy.
03/09/07
A great piece of filmmaking and a legitimate science-fiction/horror classic.
03/09/07
The problem with the film is that the sum isn't greater than the parts and the pieces don't fuse in a way that's consistently pleasing or cinematically satisfying.
03/09/07
Bong Joon-ho's The Host is the best kind of genre film, a movie that delivers the conventions audiences expect from a horror flick while also offering surprising new variations on the formula.
03/09/07
The Host is wildly entertaining; people who love the genre will get their geek buttons pushed hard by this flick. But what makes the movie an instant classic is that it's also, in its dark heart, a furious lampoon.
03/09/07
The first good horror movie of the year.
03/09/07
The Host is a loopy, feverishly imaginative genre hybrid about the demons that haunt us from without and within.
03/09/07
Top CriticThe Host is a horror movie with a difference. South Korea's biggest box-office hit ever, the thriller -- by director-writer Bong Joon-ho -- is a fantastical genre-buster.
03/09/07
Bong Joon-ho's cheerfully outrageous monster movie is set to attain instant cult status.
03/09/07
Packed with politics, family conflict and satiric references to some of the more absurd aspects of Korean cinema, The Host never forgets to be a scary, icky, over-the-top fright fest, either.
03/09/07
Latest News for The Host
September 02, 2009:
First Look: The Host 2 
Eager for an early glimpse of one of the monsters you'll see in "The Host 2"? Twitch has what you're looking for. More...
March 18, 2009:
Bong Joon-ho Discusses Upcoming Projects
Director Bong Joon-ho isn't involved with the upcoming sequel to his hit monster movie "The Host," but he does have a number of other projects in the pipeline -- including "an... More...
November 19, 2008:
The Host Is Coming to America
According to Bong Joon-ho, director of "The Host," Universal has purchased the American rights to his film, and the studio is planning a remake for U.S. audiences. More...
June 26, 2008:
The Host 2 Filming in Early '09
Director Ning Hao will helm and script a Chinese sequel to the Korean box-office smash The Host, scheduled to film early next year. More...
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