Average Rating: 7.8/10
Reviews Counted: 145
Fresh: 134 | Rotten: 11
As populace pleasing as it is intellectually satisfying, The Host combines scares, laughs, and satire into a riveting, monster movie.
Average Rating: 7.8/10
Critic Reviews: 38
Fresh: 36 | Rotten: 2
As populace pleasing as it is intellectually satisfying, The Host combines scares, laughs, and satire into a riveting, monster movie.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 169,525
When a young girl is snatched away from her father by a horrifying giant monster that emerges from the River Han to wreak havoc on Seoul, her entire family sets out to locate the beast and bring their little girl back home to safety in South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's big-budget creature feature. Hee-bong is a man of modest means who runs a snack bar on the banks of the River Han. Along with his slow-witted eldest son, Gang-du; Gang-du's young daughter, Hyun-seo; archery champion daughter
R, 1 hr. 59 min.
Drama, Action & Adventure, Horror, Art House & International, Comedy
Mar 9, 2007 Wide
Jul 24, 2007
$2.0M
Magnolia Pictures
All Critics (148) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (143) | Rotten (12) | DVD (33)
As ebullient and bizarre as a monster that can do back flips, leaving the viewer in a shock of delight.
A horror thriller, a political satire, a dysfunctional family comedy, and a touching melodrama, Bong Joon-ho's The Host is also one helluva monster movie.
Bravely shifting tones from the horrific to the slapstick and back again, Bong Joon-ho has made a movie that's comprised almost equally of family sitcom, political indictment, high-urban paranoia and maximum-geek, monster-movie delight.
Maybe this is actually a treatise on the dissonance between East and West, science and nature, promise and tragedy. Nah. It's just a dumb, crappy horror movie that wants to be celebrated as such.
The film's limber and inventive director Joon-ho Bong keeps The Host creeping and leaping for its entire two hours, which are filled with incident after incident, alternately terrifying, ridiculous, suspenseful and wry.
Individual stories bog down the film's pace, but The Host recovers quickly to redefine horror for the new millennium. This you have to see.
A livid bureaucratic satire, berserk creature feature and surprisingly somber drama, "The Host" is a convulsive, wild ride - simultaneously eliciting squirms and giggles by mashing up finger-pointing anger with "The Thing's" wiseass wickedness.
A pleasant reminder of the pleasures in the low-budget quickly made monster B-film of the 1950s.
A subversive blast
South Korean creature feature is wild and witty.
This monster movie from the Republic of Korea is one of the best films of its kind.
Minor flaws in a film destined to be embraced by genre fans worldwide.
A fantastic satire/monster movie
Imagine Little Miss Sunshine and Alien mixed together and you'll have an inkling of what South Korea's The Host has in store for you.
Ako se zanemari politi%u010Dka pozadina, "Doma%u0107in" funkcionira kao vrlo dobar akcijski horor.
A rather tender-hearted, often sorrowful, more often hilarious view on the familial conflicts between generations and between siblings.
Joon-ho Bong effectue un pied de nez pour le moins renversant à une formule attribuant ordinairement une force psychologique surhumaine à ses protagonistes
Think Godzilla, but with better special effects and better all-around filmmaking
...a fairly old-fashioned creature feature with a few uplifting human touches, made all the better for its added visual and sonic delights. (HD DVD Edition)
If the slow pacing and gawky acting seem typical of low-budget monster movies, so much the better.
This was a top notch monster movie and even though the dubbing was pretty bad and it more than likely added to the confusion it was a pretty solid thrill ride.
May 11, 2008Super Reviewer
Just....awesome! A great monster film with its own subtle sense of humour to it. Bong Joon-Ho's direction is superb, which shows in the way he directs some of the most intense monster attack scenes I've seen and providing us with a few memorable shots. This is not only one of my favourite monster movies, it might be
July 1, 2011Super Reviewer
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