Chawz

When is a giant boar also a giant bore? When it's the monstrous, man-eating wild swine in this overlong Korean land-based rip-off of Jaws, in which the titular porcine beast threatens a remote farming village just as the harvest season gets underway. The carnage begins soon after Officer Kim (Eum Tae-Woong), a bumbling and bewildered cop reassigned from Seoul, arrives in town. Hunters, elders, and scientific researchers are unable to track down the creature, so it's up to Kim to lead a posse and get the job done. Intended as a horror comedy in the vein of the much superior The Host, filmmaker Shin Jung-Won's Chawz is neither funny nor scary. What passes for humor involves people screaming at one another, slapping each other around, or clumsily falling down hillsides. And any tension that inadvertently builds up here is easily dissipated by stocking the narrative with generic characters so crudely played it's impossible to develop the slightest concern for any of them. Add effects that are hardly state-of-the-art (with some ludicrously poor superimpositions), and you have an all-around loser. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)