In THE GUARD POST, a Korean plague/zombie film, a company of soldiers arrives at a guard post in the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea for its three-month shift. They find only one man alive from the previous shift, the rest dead from an extremely dangerous contagion.
I enjoyed this movie. It starts out as a mystery. We know what the soldiers are in for, but they don’t, and in that process of discovery lies the fun. It also raises interesting questions about how people behave when they have a disease and know they’re going to die. In panic, they want to get out, get somewhere safe. But if they leave, they’ll spread the disease and end the world.
Note THE GUARD POST could be considered a zombie movie, since the disease makes people act out in a violent way, but there isn’t much in the way of zombie action. One would expect there to be an outbreak, most of the soldiers are infected, and the infected relentlessly attack the survivors. It’s not like that. The story is really about the slow deterioration of a highly disciplined military unit during plague.
At times, the film was a little confusing for me. The viewer is introduced to a large number of characters, everybody’s wearing the same clothes (combat fatigues), and some of the plotting doesn’t appear to make sense or at least had me wondering. I enjoyed it anyway.
THE GUARD POST is available for streaming on Netflix.
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