Fantasia ’24: Mash Ville

They might be moonshining siblings, but Joo Je-song and his two half-brothers are no Dukes of Hazard. For one thing, there latest batch is legitimately lethal and racking up a body-count among their regular customers. They try to retrieve the bad brew, but that takes them to a small provincial town where a doomsday religious cult has its own homicidal ideas in Hwang Wook’s Mash Ville, which screened during the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.

The film’s early rhythms are somewhat unsteady, like the shambling of a stoner zombie. Eventually, all these odd characters will come together in a small town that is about to become a ghost town. Fortunately, Joo’s half-bro’s were drunk on someone else’s product when he walked in on them, but their now deceased friend was pounding their Moonlight Whiskey. Obviously, they need to recall their bad batch, so they carjack Ms. Jeong.

At least she had the good sense to decline the Moonlight Whiskey the bartender pushed on her, during her latest bout of binge drinking. She got so drunk she forgot to pick up a corpse dummy for her demanding producer. “Fortunately,” a random woman decided to climb into her trunk, where she apparently died. The producer is thrilled by the corpse’s lifelike qualities, but she is freaking out trying to figure out what to do with it next.

Joo and the Bros maybe solve her problem when they carjack her. They need to get to the small town where they shipped their deadly stock. Meanwhile, a pair of religious fanatics are killing townsfolk one by one, until they have a dozen corpses, but not just any twelve. They need to have one that was born in each calendar month of the year.

That is the over-simplified version. Hwang and co-screenwriter Lim Dong-min have a whole lot of weirdness going on in this film. A lot of it is amusing in a “huh, wha…” kind of way. However, there are also times when it is just a lot.

Still, both Jeon Sin-hwan and Jin Ye-sol milk the bizarre situations and their disreputable characters for a lot of laughs. Mash Ville is boozier than a Hong Sang-soo film and more violent than a Tarantino picture—often in shockingly random ways. Sometimes, it really feels like a throwback to the late 1990s desperately “edgy” indie crime-thrillers the latter inspired.

Hwang’s execution is still entertaining and sufficiently interesting to hook fans of Korean noir. The two hour-plus running time is a bit excessive, just like everything else associated with this film. Still, you ought to respect Hwang’s strategy of piling more on top of more. Recommended as a very Fantasia film, Mash Ville had its international premiere at this year’s Fantasia.