Reviews
Revisiting ‘Peninsula’ (2020): A Worthy Sequel, or a Road Trip Doomed to Fail?
In reality, Peninsula has a lot of intention and love put into it by Yeong Sang-ho, and it ends up being a wild expansion of the world he’s made. It’s very clear the movie was an experiment in cutting loose and having fun with the setting after a bleak prequel and a heartbreaking masterpiece. In a way, it tells a funny story of success: Sang-ho had gotten his licks in with one cinematic juggernaut and charmed the world, and Peninsula was just meant to be high-octane gravy for the accolades.
Do you remember when, in the wake of Train to Busan’s wild popularity and success, an American remake called “The Last Train to New York” was announced? Being a horror freak first, and a public transit lover second, I naturally joined in on the bashing of the concept. It felt silly given the state of American railways, and somewhat lousy American remakes paving its road (laying its tracks?); above all else, it seemed impossible to make work.
Train to Busan ripped like a firestorm through audiences across the globe in 2016 after its Cannes premiere because of its performances. It was a zombie movie that, in an era where the high saturation of zombie films had worn plenty of us out, felt like a radical change to the usual recipe. There was a once-in-a-lifetime synergy between actors, and I don’t think there was a single weak performance in the entire cast. The effects, the story, and hoo-boy that gutpunch of an ending, was in short, lightning in a bottle.
To think they could do that again, let alone think an American studio with few ties to the original cast and crew could, was a delusion. As much as I love Timo Tjahanto and James Wan, who were slated to direct and produce the film respectively, Last Train has been in development hell since 2018 for a reason, and I think that reason is not a lot of people have confidence in it making its money back.
And that last bit is what brings us to today’s conversation. A conversation about The Train to Busan franchise “sequel” that actually did happen, and was actually pretty commercially successful despite failing to please critics: Yeong Sang-ho’s 2020 film Peninsula.
PENINSULA IS AN ACTION HORROR ROLLERCOASTER—WHERE PEOPLE EXPECTED A HEARTBREAKER
You’ll notice the word sequel is in some incredibly heavy quotation marks, because the film only shares a universe with the original. Otherwise, it’s a standalone film, and a pretty weird one to follow up the first with either way. Peninsula isn’t even the first film to expand on the world of Train to Busan this way, since that would be the 3D animated prequel film Seoul Station which came before it, which Sang-ho also directed.
Seoul Station needs a whole article of its own to dissect because it is incredibly heavy, incredibly depressing, and serves as an appropriately serious insight into the early hours of the outbreak in Seoul and the rapid decay of society that ensued.
…Yeah, Peninsula, is not at all that.
Peninsula is an action-horror zombie apocalypse heist film more along the lines of Land of the Dead or Army of the Dead, filled with plenty of action set pieces that betray your idea of what a Train to Busan sequel would be like. It certainly starts off with a harrowing scene that would fit right at home in its predecessor: our main character, a military officer named Jung-seok, refusing to save a child and their parents in order to get his own family to a port for evacuation. And though he makes it to safety with them, it’s short-lived, as his family is killed by a stray infected on the boat, leaving behind only him and his brother-in-law Chul-min alive in the chaos.
Four years later, the estranged in-laws are brought together by a crime boss to head back into South Korea, now simply known as the Peninsula. Their mission is simple: retrieve a truck full of smuggled American cash back to the docks and receive $2.5 million each for their troubles. The 30-minute mark is where the film unmasks itself as being a much less serious affair, and the heist takes a backseat so we can watch a stone-faced teenage girl and her little sister drive through hordes and powerslide an SUV into a bunch of zombies.
Needless to say, it rules.
HIGH-OCTANE SETPIECES THAT MAKE REHASHED ZOMBIE MOVIE TROPES WORTH WATCHING
Between arena games with the undead, a rat king made of zombies, and Mad Max-esque chase sequences through a post-apocalyptic Seoul, Peninsula genuinely has some of the best action I’ve seen in a zombie movie to date. The film is absolutely more on the Dead Rising side of things rather than The Last of Us side, but it’s at its best when it’s embracing that.
On a technical level, the film suffers from depicting most vehicle stunts with subpar CGI. The set design of all the spaces outside of the computer-generated exteriors do feel pretty detailed, and the light flourishes we get out of existing zombie movie tropes you’ve seen before are fun. Peninsula doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but after decades of seeing the same stories play out over and over in zombie films, the bar has been raised far too high in the kind of inventiveness we’re expecting out of zombie b-movies. And this film is just inventive enough for me to work.
THE HEROES ARE NICE, BUT THE VILLAINS SHINE
But then, how are the people inhabiting this world? How are the performances? There are some pretty distractingly bad English-speaking actors early on in the film, given thick and poorly written exposition dumps they have to deliver. I will be honest with you and say that their acting was what initially made me turn my back on the movie a few years back. But do not make that same mistake, because the actual main cast is pretty great in this.
Granted, they’re playing the same characters you’ve seen in every zombie movie ever, but they’re not doing a bad job. Jeong-Seok (Gang Dong-won) is your typical stoic soldier who is making up for the people he couldn’t save; Min-Jung (Lee Jung-Hyun) is a mother who has had to become battle-hardened to protect her children. Together they drive a lot of the tension of the film and have good chemistry. Kwon Hae-hyo is pretty delightful as the senile veteran grandfather of Min-Jung’s group, Elder Kim, who plays with a ham radio, calling for non-existent backup and stylizing himself as a renowned tactician.
But where the cast really glows is in its three main villains: Captain Seo, Private Kim, and Sergeant Hwang. They’re members of Unit 631, an abandoned military taskforce meant to secure civilians, who in four years of solitude have gone completely insane, and they nail this. Actor Kim Min-Jae plays Hwang with a sadist’s glee that would have him at home as part of some The Walking Dead antagonists, but I loved the acting of Kim Kyu-baek as the mealy-mouthed human eel that is Private Kim. It’s a shame they don’t interact that much in the movie, since they’re enemies for most of the runtime, but they both are phenomenal.
LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF TRAIN TO BUSAN
It is far from flawless, but all in all Peninsula is a pretty good film. At the very least, it’s a fun film despite some of its quality issues. I would say it even achieves a level of decent rewatchability. It was fun enough to lure audiences in globally even during the midst of a pandemic, making its money back handily; it even charted at the international box office with the biggest IMAX run in several countries in Southeast Asia according to Deadline.
Critics’ reviews were certainly not shining, but they also weren’t piling on the film, either. That didn’t come until later, when online chatter really began to focus on Peninsula just not being another Train to Busan. Despite being very clearly titled as a spin-off (with the promotional material marked Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula), everything I had heard about the movie at the time of its release, up until a few months ago, was a conversation about how it failed as a sequel.
The first review that pops up for the film on Google, as well as hundreds of reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, deride the film for not being a good continuation when it never could have been. Compound that with the technical and performance issues mentioned, and it was very clear a loud contingent of fans of Train to Busan saw this as nothing but a cash grab, an idea that spread out and kind of harmed the reputation of the film online as a result.
In reality, Peninsula has a lot of intention and love put into it by Yeong Sang-ho, and it ends up being a wild expansion of the world he’s made. It’s very clear the movie was an experiment in cutting loose and having fun with the setting after a bleak prequel and a heartbreaking masterpiece. In a way, it tells a funny story of success: Sang-ho had gotten his licks in with one cinematic juggernaut and charmed the world, and Peninsula was just meant to be high-octane gravy for the accolades.
Whether his teased plans to expand into a Peninsula sequel and television series will ever come to fruition is unknown. But if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter; Peninsula already proves through its flaws that Sang-ho can take you for a wild ride when he wants– all you have to do is let him.
Happy watching horror fans!
Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a piece of visual candy that everyone needs to get a taste of. Fitting, considering candy is at the center of the film’s visual language, and even becomes a large part of its set dressing. It’s an aesthetic choice that might signal to some that the film is meant to be more sugary or cloying about what it’s trying to say. And while it has a streak of sentimentality over horror films and how they shape their viewers that borders on being maudlin, Camp Miasma is genuinely too clever and full of surprises to be that simple.
The opening credits, for one, hold a personal favorite of these surprises. The sequence is an extended montage of merch and material for the fictional Camp Miasma films at the center of the plot; it’s an ersatz Friday the 13th franchise with a Sleepaway Camp story, and a Halloween number of awful sequels.
Camp Miasma Has Surprises in Store for You
The collection we’re treated to is a rapid-fire barrage of proof for the film’s attention to detail, with painstakingly crafted props and artwork that feel very familiar. VHS tapes and DVDs across the decades. Action figures and arcade games, Topps style movie trading cards with a stick of bubble gum that has long since turned to dust. And most enjoyably, a series of negative reviews and scandalous articles depicting the rise and fall of Camp Miasma as a series.
By the end of that montage, I felt nostalgia for movies that I had not and would never see, and that hit like a Mack truck. While this does very effectively set the stage for a simple meta-horror film, plucking at the familiar chords of something like Behind the Mask, Camp Miasma really violently breaks the mold. What results is a cosmic horror romantic comedy drama slasher, and more importantly, it’s one of the best-looking movies you’ll see all year as it pulls off that wild balancing act.
(That is, if you’re close enough to a theater showing it to see it.)
What is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma About?
After entering a period of dormancy following a handful of box office bombs and dwindling popularity, the problematic Camp Miasma franchise has returned as a “zombie IP” decades later. The rights holders are hungry for a profitable reboot. And the necromancer they’ve hired for the job is the ambitious but green writer-director Kris (Hannah Einbinder). A critically acclaimed queer filmmaker, she’s begrudgingly tasked with sanding down its transphobic and sexist edges in favor of something cleaner and more palatable.
In search of inspiration, Kris visits Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress for final girl Squeak from the first Camp Miasma film. The reclusive Billy lives at the real-life camp the film was shot at, isolated from the world and crystallized into a horror movie museum. Immediately finding kinship in their love of the franchise, Kris’ fascination with getting Billy to star in the reboot quickly turns into romantic interest. But as that romance develops, the awkward Kris’s sexual awakening coincides with strange occurrences and hallucinations that suggest the film, and its killer, may be much more real than she bargained for.
A Wildly Fun Project That Changes the Pace for Jane Schoenbrun
It’s borderline criminal how narrow and staggered the theatrical release for Camp Miasma is going to be, because all the love it’s been getting on the festival circuit is not just critical buzz. It’s not an inside baseball sort of film, despite its myriad references to the horror genre on either side of the camera. It is, in fact, the director’s most accessible and fun film yet.
That was pretty vocally Schoenbrun’s goal; their third full length feature really does succeed with flying colors at feeling like “a conversation with a friend”, a sentiment they communicated during a Deadline interview at Cannes. It certainly feels lighter and more playful with the audience at the very least. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a noided, uncomfortable psychological endeavor about ARGs, internet culture, and isolated youth. I Saw the TV Glow was an expertly crafted but very harrowing thesis on the trans experience, dysphoria, and alienation.
But Camp Miasma, despite the dark places that it goes to for its characters, is a movie filled with so much cheer and humor, and made with so much care and love, that you can feel it in every single frame. The story it tells is inherently a happy one, despite the number of times someone explodes into a geyser of blood thanks to our film’s killer, Little Death. (Yes, they basically named him The Orgasm, but I said the movie was fun and made with love, not that it was particularly subtle.)
Expertly Exploring Sexuality and Filmmaking with Anderson and Einbinder
One also shouldn’t mistake the emphasis on how fun it is as an excuse for the film lacking substance either. Camp Miasma is heartfelt in its craft but really does boast a depth of character in its writing with how it explores desire and sexuality. It’s about sexual tension, sexual dysfunction, sexual trauma, and ultimately sexual liberation. And most importantly, it’s about how sex and sexuality inspires, informs, and shapes art on a fundamental level and vice versa.
The script is certainly thoughtful in this aspect but is especially carried by the two leads who fit their roles like they were poured into them. Even when Schoenbrun’s writing is heavy-handed and veers into self-indulgent territory (read: inevitable given the self-referential nature of the story), the two hold it down tremendously. Anderson is always a delight to see but is exceptionally charming here as Billy. The silky southern accent and the mellow Hollywood starlet appeal are all you really need to fall in love the way Kris does, but the charm masks a much more complex set of feelings that lie just below the surface.
More importantly, Einbinder’s captivating performance drives the film as much as the film drives her character. As Kris discovers more about herself, the breadth of emotion that begins to be unlocked translates to a really compelling unfolding of the material in Einbinder’s hands. It also culminates in the film’s funniest moment as Kris’ revelations about Camp Miasma and herself spill out at the worst possible time; it’s a scene that kills in a packed theater, and it’s worth the price of admission just to see it.
The Best Set Design You’ll See in A Movie All Year
Above all else, Camp Miasma deserves its flowers for its photography and production design. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue have concocted one of the most visually striking and texturally rich movies this year from a photography standpoint. The camera work, color grading, and lighting are all phenomenally visceral. Appropriately so, given the subject matter at hand.
But what really steals the show is the set design. Designers Matt Hyland and Brandon Tonner-Connolly deserve praise in particular, having crafted the absolutely gorgeous glass matte backdrops that make up so much of the film’s exterior shots. They, like all of the set design here and Schoenbrun’s use of soft lighting and super-rich colors, are a good cross section of what makes the film tick: they are enticingly surreal, suffused with this almost visible dream energy. It’s all marked by glowing memories and the desire to return to them in a palpable way. There’s nostalgia in every brushstroke of those matte paintings, and every bit of the film’s composition.
I could go on, but the summary judgment for the best franchise that never existed is already in: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a kaleidoscope of pure emotion and creative passion that needs to be seen on the big screen post-haste. If you get the chance to see it on one, don’t hesitate to take it.
If film school wasn’t scary enough because of incel film-bros and awful thesis projects, a serial killer is now hunting down film students! As a former film student, that’s scary! Or is it? Urban Legends: Final Cut is decidedly not frightening. In fact, it’s barely quantifiable as horror. However, if you’re wanting some late 90s-Y2K slice-and-dicing, you’ve come to the right place.
More similar to the Scream franchise than the first Urban Legend, Final Cut maintains its academic setting, switching over this time to a film academy. A group of tight-knit co-eds are hard at work on their Senior projects. Each is vying for the prestigious Hitchcock Award, which would guarantee feature funding, alongside Hollywood stardom! However, when a fencing-masked serial killer starts taking them out one-by-one, it becomes clear someone would kill to make it big. The movie is a ton of fun, with really intelligent meta-humor and a surprisingly complex mystery.
Urban Legends: Final Cut is Meta-Slashing Done Right
Meta-slashers are old news in 2026-definitely no doubt about that! However, coming out the same year as Scream 3, one has to respect Urban Legends: Final Cut on its multiple layers. Making the first film basically an “urban legend” in this movie is a really fun concept.
Having our final girl, Amy (Jennifer Morrison), make a student-film version of the original Urban Legend is additionally really inventive. The movie has an awareness of slashers and horror movies like Scream, but its nerdiness feels like it overpowers the full-on story. It boasts a really complicated mystery!
The film works as a comedic, suspenseful whodunit, while having a lot of fun with its set pieces. Its setting is also not just a random change-of-pace. Its mystery (without spoiling) is intertwined with the concept of student filmmaking, with every little joke and jab having some connection to the overarching mystery. Understandable why horror fans may have been disappointed, but still, its mystery is top-notch, albeit with some predictable outcomes.
What is interesting is how tonally the movie feels much more in line with Scream than Urban Legend. It has no dark academia creeps, but visually it is a poppier, more pop-corny horror flick. The characters are all a little cartoonish, and its plethora of solid film industry jokes (that land maybe 60% of the time…?) make it really light viewing. For this critic, it’s a positive. However, that might not be a total positive for fans of the first.
A Franchise Done Dirty
Subjectively, this is a movie that really works. However, objectively, it is really frustrating as a franchise film. On its own, Final Cut sustains itself as a really fun meta-whodunit. However, as a sequel to Urban Legend? It’s totally baffling.
The biggest crime of this movie is that it is a sequel with no reason in being such. It only vaguely connects to the first film, and more importantly…HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH URBAN LEGENDS! The idea that the first movie is an urban legend is really clever! However, the first movie had nothing to do with the film industry! They could have at least played into some film urban legends, like with the skeletons in Poltergeist or the deaths surrounding The Omen or The Exorcist, but no. It really squandered this clear opportunity to make a throughline between meta film humor and urban legends.
Additionally, the movie is far from perfect outside of its franchise follies. For one, and this is a total nitpick and gripe, the killer mask. The fencing mask is pretty baffling, and feels really disconnected. Why not give him camera lenses for eyes? Or any kind of classic film monster mask? It’s a film school, so the opportunities should be endless for mask design. Additionally, a lot of the humor is kind of outdated, but that’s to be expected from an early-2000s horror flick.
Slasher 101
This might not matter at all to the casual viewer, but the film has a really good understanding of film school. It’s accurate in the production and environment of film school, even if it is heightened. This further lends itself to the commentary of the movie. Well, what commentary there vaguely is.
For all its silliness, the film covers a lot of issues of the film industry, particularly in academic spaces. Misogynistic film bros, toxic masculinity on sets, and nepotism are all topical social issues in the industry. The movie tackles social commentary as gracefully as a 2000s slasher-comedy can…which is just okay. But it still does it!
Urban Legends: Final Cut is definitely worth checking out. As long as you do not consider it a sequel. It is totally in a league of its own…for better or worse.
