Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Badland Hunters’ on Netflix, A Dystopian Actioner Buoyed By Enjoyable Tough Guy Ma Dong-Seok

In Badland Hunters (Netflix), after an earthquake devastates Seoul and cancels society, it falls to Ma Dong-seok to bust a million heads, shoot a bunch of his attackers too, and strive to save the life of a young woman held captive by an insane scientist high on his own supply. This isn’t exactly K-Zombie territory – Hunters goes out of its way to never say the Z-word. But the similarities to zombie tropes in movies and TV are many, they intersect with a dystopian aesthetic that’s just as familiar, and Ma himself was a memorable presence in Train to Busan. In other words, Badland Hunters is not inventing anything new. But that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable to watch the beefy, bruising actor beat the hell out of his crazed adversaries while chewing on lines like “Get a grip. These things aren’t human.”    

BADLAND HUNTERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: When we meet medical researcher Yang Gi-su (Lee Hee-joon), he’s surrounded by lab lizards with bulbous spinal growths and the corpses of his colleagues, who he just murdered. So Yang isn’t exactly a trustable source when he swears he’s only saving his sick daughter, who he has strapped to a gurney, by injecting her with a sickly green concoction of his own invention. But this guy’s mania is the least of our problems – for now – because suddenly Seoul is destroyed by a massive, building-swallowing earthquake.

Fast-forward three years. In an urban ruin that looks generated by Midjourney AI, Nam-san (Ma) and Ji-wan (Lee Jun-young) hunt for game with a serrated machete and bow and arrow. With fellow survivors, they’ve established a makeshift village, but their relative peace is shattered when a young woman named Su-na (Roh Jeong-eui) is abducted by an armed group. They claim Su-na will be cared for at their compound, an apartment complex left untouched by the quake. There’s fresh water there, too, which is a hot commodity in this destroyed landscape where drought conditions persist. But Nam-san, Ji-wan, and their new ally, former soldier Eun-ho (An Ji-hye), immediately smell a rat. What they don’t immediately suspect is that many in this suspicious group also eats rats. Alive.

It turns out Yang, the mad scientist, survived to thrive in this new dystopia, and he’s now the de facto ruler of The Apartment. In a laboratory running on solar and generators a la Will Smith’s Robert Neville in I Am Legend, Yang has continued his awful experiments, and Su-na is slated to be his next subject. With slave labor to work on water filtration and a security force consisting of Eun-ho’s old unit – as products of Yang’s experiments themselves, the soldiers exhibit traits ranging from lizard-like to zombie-adjacent – Yang seems untouchable. But his ranting about building a new humanity soon runs into the unstoppable force that is Nam-san’s fists.    

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Badland Hunters contains bits and pieces of many dystopias. The compound where most of the action occurs, with the ample fresh water supply it barters for slaves, is like The Citadel from Mad Max: Fury Road. The destroyed cityscape, and the sputtering new evolution manifested in the creatures who dwell within it, suggests the South Korean series Sweet Home. And while Hunters director Heo Myung-haeng told Korean media that his film is not affiliated with Um Tae-hwa’s recent Concrete Utopia, the two films share a society-destroying earthquake, an apartment setting, and a ragtag group of people struggling to survive. Interestingly, as Badland Hunters arrives on Netflix, Utopia has just secured its own deal for US streaming. 

Performance Worth Watching: This is Ma Dong-seok’s show, basically, and his surly tough guy hero act is enjoyable in its grumpiness. “So you’re the hunter,” Yang’s lead thug challenges through his half-destroyed – don’t say zombie! – face as they square off, and Ma’s Nam-san is like “What else would I be, a lover? I’m in a rush. Let’s make this quick.” 

Memorable Dialogue: “You must be tired of talking. Take a nap.” Wu-BAHM!! In the showiest example of Badland Hunters never growing tired of seeing Ma knock dudes out, Nam-san “interrogates” a line of cowering dystopian gang members by delivering six haymakers to six jaws in roughly six seconds.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: In Badland Hunters, the baddest badland hunter himself, Ma Dong-seok’s Nam-san, repeats one question while chopping off heads, delivering death punches, and firing his shotgun into swarms of mindless attacking freaks: “What are these things?” The answer, of course, and the word Hunters continually attempts to not say, is zombies. They might have forked lizard tongues, or snack on live varmints like the reptilian aliens in the 1983 miniseries V, or be the living side effects of the film’s resident mad scientist’s experiments. But they act like zombies, move like zombies, and die like them, too. And that dying, once it gets going, becomes pretty enjoyable in its own way, as Nam-san and his allies advance through their attackers on the way to save Su-Na from Yang Gi-su’s clutches. The fight sequences In Hunters are shot largely in aggressive close-ups that capture big punches, sweeping kicks (An Ji-hye executes a few impressive takedowns in this regard), and skulls getting splattered by bullets and shotgun shells. Whether they’re zombies or something else, they’re all just fodder for an extended ballet of on screen kills.

There is the semblance of a dystopian plot to contend with. Yang’s experiments on young people have something to do with extracting juice from their pituitary glands, and there’s the matter of what he did to make his security force transform into…well, you know. But none of that stuff really hits, and feels like filler between the fights. And by the time the doctor really goes off his rocker, Badland Hunters can even start to feel like the whacked-out horror comedy of the 1985 classic Re-Animator. But let’s get back to the bruising. Because what you’ve come for is to see Ma Dong-seok in action, and in that sense, Hunters does not disappoint.

Our Call: The dystopian frame, and the don’t-call-them-zombies threat – you’ve seen it before, lots of times. But Badland Hunters is still a STREAM IT, based almost solely on Ma Dong-seok’s screen presence and bad guy-beating prowess. 

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.