A Werewolf Boy

This is not a review. This is a public service announcement.

[*A Werewolf Boy*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2315152/) has a 7.4/10 rating on IMDB. Do not believe their lies. It’s nothing but a pile of fake sentimentality and manufactured nostalgia.

Sun-yi is a fifteen-year-old girl who moves into a farm with her mother and younger sister. The farm used to belong to an old and grizzled man, who we see die of a heart attack in one of the first scenes. The girl’s family is struggling, and her dad’s former business partner purchased the farm for them.

It comes with strings attached: the partner’s son, a caricature of an abusive, drunken gigolo. Evil Gigolo hangs around on and off, and is obsessed with Sun-yi marrying him for unspecified reasons.

The family soon finds (and adopts) a savage youngster, who the former farm owner kept in a filthy shed with clearly little human love. The “boy” (he looks to be at least 18) acts like a dog, and can’t speak nor understand Korean.

Or can’t, most of the time. His level of linguistic comprehension fluctuates depending on what the movie needs him to. At one point he can’t understand “*no*” or “*later*”. On another scene, he’s just fine with “*that other person who isn’t here hid the guitar because he wants your puppy-love girl to be sad*”. He doesn’t even count as a cartoon: he’s a K-pop version of what Lucky McKee did a lot better in [*The Woman*](http://filmsnark.tumblr.com/post/142237874036/the-woman), the acting so caricaturesque you could swap him with Chris Kattan’s Mr. Peepers and nobody would notice.
Yes, this movie has me praising *The Woman* by comparison. *The Woman* was clumsy, but at least wasn’t this calculating.

Of course the girl falls in love with the movie’s tender eponym, which irks Evil Gigolo. He starts acting like even more of a dick, attempts to rape her, is thwarted by Wolfboy and returns with his cronies to teach him a lesson.

And then — SPOILER! — it turns out mangy-pretty-boy is not a metaphorical wolf-boy but a literal one, who hulks out when stressed. Kind of like that atrocious Fox TV Series [*Werewolf*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf_(TV_series)), only he doesn’t need to wait until the bad guys decide to conveniently pick the full moon to harass him.

This brings fat, sweaty, uncaring Korean army officers into the mix, along with a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo, just so the script can thwart the pure love between swoon-face and Sun-yi.

Dawww.

She sends puppy boy away by throwing a rock at him (she’s been treating him like a dog during the entire movie, which is supposed to be cute). The rock leaves a scar on his angelic face, even though a steel beam falling from two-stories up had failed to hurt him before, and he regenerated other wounds instantly.

Maybe meant to say something about those who we love having the power to hurt us. Likely the scriptwriter not even trying to make sense, since the hulking-out-into-a-werewolf is the most coherent bit of the movie.

I recently said the same thing about [*Gassoh*](http://filmsnark.tumblr.com/post/146405656369/gassoh), but this feels like just another attempt at capitalizing on a young actor’s fanbase. *A Werewolf Boy* has no aspirations beyond making a gaggle of young girls go *squee!*, then rush home to write in their diaries about how they wish they’d found a ragged but adorable savage model-boy in the woods, so they could love him and hug him and cherish him and squeeze him and lock him up and never let anyone else get near him.

Unless that sounds like you, skip it.