The action movie that used two and a half tonnes of fake blood during production
Action cinema has never been a stranger to buckets of blood, but writer and director Kim Hong-seon’s maniacal sci-fi thriller Project Wolf Hunting decided to up the ante to ridiculous levels.
The easiest way to describe it would be as a cross between Con Air and Predator, but that’s still not really doing it justice. A band of dangerous criminals are being transported on a cargo ship, but they’ve secretly masterminded a plan to escape and take over the vessel.
However, a claret-soaked spanner is thrown into the works when it’s discovered the ship is also harbouring a dangerous and deadly scientific experiment that would love nothing more than to escape from its shackles and turn anybody who gets in its way into a sludgy pulp.
It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that definitely happens, with limbs being torn off and heads being mangled in a multitude of different ways in virtually every scene once the inmates put their plan to run the asylum into motion. Blood is part and parcel of the extreme side of the action genre, but Project Wolf Hunting literally used tonnes of the stuff.
Holding its world premiere as part of the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness selection, the esteemed annual event proudly informed the world that Hong-seon used over two and a half tonnes of fake blood in order to realise his destructive vision.
Further displaying his desire to cover as much of his feature as possible in the highest levels of plasma imaginable, the filmmaker told ScreenRant how “we created new blood pumps” to maximise the arterial spray, because in his words, “blood does not just seep out”. In Project Wolf Hunting, it most certainly does not, to the extent the audience is left wondering if a papercut would be enough to cause a cavalcade.
Blazing a brand new and exceedingly bloody trail for his local industry, Hong-seon admitted to Flickering Myth that “something like this had never been done in a Korean film” before, but his desire “to rival what’s been done in Hollywood” saw his effects team knuckle down and create brand new means of raising the bar.
In the director’s eyes, why have somebody simply get punched by a hulking monster and fall over when they can have their organs pulverised, their throat torn out, and their scalp ripped off, all of which involves jets of blood so ludicrously overblown that it’s borderline comedic?
Of course, Project Wolf Hunting is not a comedy, but action aficionados were nonetheless left with a smirk on their face after witnessing just how far Hong-seon was willing to go in an effort to craft the most over the top, extravagant, and sanguinary movie possible. It’s not for the faint of heart, but those two and a half tonnes are right there on the screen for everyone to see.
