What in Haruhi’s name did I just watch? I mean, I know what I watched – the 2009 cinematic outing King of Thorn – but… what was that? That’s the sense the film leaves you with. Heck, that’s the sense you spend most of the second half feeling, a barrage of confusion that’s present and relentless.
I’m saying this at the start as a little “heads up” sort of alert, that if anything I relate seems to be disjointed, or to come out of left field, that’s probably intentional as a representation of how the film does it.
We begin in the near future of 2012. A deadly virus breaks out and begins to ravage the world, pretty much ruining everyone’s day as we all know by now that even a less apocalyptic-type lethal pandemic is wont to do. The virus is named Medusa, presumably because after a 30-60 day asymptomatic incubation period, the infected turn to chalky white stone and crumble away.
We get a fairly long opening, throwing a lot of ideas into a montage. Some people think Medusa is an act of bioterrorism, but the very company suspected has a plan to save at least some infected by placing them in cold sleep. They only have room in their giant lab built into a giant ancient castle for a hundred sixty pods, though, and thus hold a global lottery for the slots. Maybe you should have invested a little more in berths and a little less in scenic locations, but that also might just be me.
The whole lottery aspect is an excuse to have our future cast be wildly colorful and come from all walks of life. Well, at least it’s the first excuse. We’ll get into the rest when we get to it. We follow Kasumi Ishiki, the one of a pair of otherwise identical twins who needs glasses, as everybody goes through orientation to be put into cryo sleep. They’re pointedly told that the health management AI will even control their dreams as they sleep the cold sleep, given some dubiously chip-like injections, and set down for a time span that’s unknown, but potentially a hundred years or more.
When Kasumi next wakes up (and, shortly after, everybody else) things are looking a little greener than when they went on ice.
Yeah, there are giant thorn vines everywhere. And, shortly after, it turns out that there are also swarms of horrid killer face-eating bat monsters. The crowd runs for the big service elevator, only for the front ranks to find out that the car isn’t there anymore. And there’s a sarlaac at the bottom of the shaft.
In the end, of the hundred sixty sleepers, we start our story proper with seven survivors who manage to get into an access tunnel away from the bats and other gribbly things at least for a moment. So, since this film is a gene splice of a zillion genres relevantly including horror, let’s sound off the cast.
Of course, we have Kasumi, who pretty much plays the Final Girl archetype straight.
Next, we have the Grumpy Old Man. He’s some Italian big wig, but I wouldn’t worry too much about him since his purpose is to die to the very next obstacle.
Then we have the Big Black Guy. Since this is a Japanese film he’s not contractually obliged to die first, and in fact more plays the role based on his background, the Cop. He will ultimately bite it, though, and I probably won’t bother to note exactly where in the first half since he just goes ahead and turns to stone in some kind of heroic sacrifice in the first act. I said he didn’t die first, not that he made it particularly far.
The Beefcake is next. His name is Marco Owen. He’s initially given the background of convict, but since he’s the group’s most competent fighter and the designated good looking male, he actually gets a few twists and turns in who and what he’s supposed to be. This is a spoiler review anyway, so I’ll come out and say that he’s a secret agent who was inserted into the group in order to investigate the company.
We also have the Crazy Lady. To be fair, she’s more sane than a lot of examples of this archetype, but her job is to be high-strung and protective of the next entry on the list when she’s not freaking out and scaring him…
That entry would be the Kid. In this case, the Kid is very fond of a video game he was playing, which becomes weirdly relevant. More on that in a moment.
Finally, we have the Wormy Guy. He knows too much and is fairly shortly outed as being not a patient but rather an employee who inserted himself into the patient pool. He’s also a contact for Marco, so I guess he has that going for him.
Anyway, the show quickly establishes a theme: we don’t really get a chance to breathe before it throws more nonsense at us. For the rest of the first half of the show, that will pretty much come in the form of the monsters the kid dubs Demonsaurus, spiky green lizard demon monsters that mostly hunt by sound, which never stops the party from yelling, running, or shooting the guns they find. The first one chomps the Grumpy Old Man.
Why are they called Demonsaurus? Because the Kid declares all the monsters and a fair number of locations and hazards to be things from his game. And he seems to be kind of right. I will give the film a little credit that the line about the AI controlling dreams was weird enough to notice, and before there’s an explicit connection made you still get the sense that there’s something dream-related happening. Like the monsters being from the Kid’s mind, or the whole thorn vine setup possibly being related to how the Crazy Lady was reading Sleeping Beauty to her kid before they were separated by the cryo-sleep.
Anyway, the constant running and fighting results in the party splitting up and meeting up repeatedly. They learn that they’ve only been out for two days. The wormy guy seemingly betrays them and takes Kasumi hostage. He reveals that this whole mess was seemingly caused by Kasumi’s sister, or said sister manifested in it, or something of that sort. He’s revealed to be working with Marco, who got a fake out death to meet up with him. Then the wormy guy gets chomped protecting Kasumi because she’s an oblivious clod who rants at him in a loud voice when they know there are swarms of enemies that hunt by sound and is incapable of noticing the giant killer monster coming up behind her.
Before he dies, he declares that knowing the secret hidden in Medusa will bring victory, and also gives Kasumi an SD card with hard evidence of the company’s crimes that seems like an important MacGuffin to take to the outside world, but that is promptly and unceremoniously disposed of in something like the second Demonsaurus scuffle after she gets it but before they reunite with the rest of the party.
Eventually, the surviving gang manages to hole up in a wine cellar. Since the room has literally no exits except the one they came in from, the writers throw them a bone and have the shady company president show up. He takes everybody down a secret passage and drops exposition on the first few layers of madness as they go.
Normally this kind of scene, learning (more of) the truth while everybody takes a quiet little walk, would be a point where a film would breathe. Not King of Thorn. Part of it is just that the exposition is so off the wall, but the other part is that we spend a lot of it in flashback scenes where stuff is happening at pace rather than in the environment where the characters are, so we can’t really soak in any kind of more sedate pacing.
So, first off, Medusa came from space. A Patient Zero, however, managed to overcome Medusa and not petrify because she had a strong will or a history of suffering or something and manifested her dreams into reality, which resulted in a chupacabra. She was experimented on as this no longer human evolved thingy, and eventually seemingly turned into the basis of that health care AI since they’re both called Alice, except where AI Alice thinks and acts like an AI not a tortured little girl. Anyway, this resulted in the company wanting to control dreams to reach the next step of sapient evolution that every thinking life form in the universe must face because space babble, and… something where they were supposed to become gods through the sleepers and also the CEO tries to shoot himself out of some religious fanaticism about Medusa, only to be stopped by Kasumi, only to die pretty immediately when we get bushwhacked by more Demonsauruses because they are the only thing on the random encounter table.
This is still sane and normal compared to where we go, but it’s the kooky foundation on which King of Thorn will build its castle of madness.
For the record, the party by now is down to Kasumi, Marco, Crazy Lady, and Kid. They all escape the dungeon by riding rising water as it becomes a massive gusher, depositing them on the moors outside the overgrown castle.
This is the end of the first half, and the end of anything sensible. Marco finds a helicopter, but Kasumi senses her sister and runs to the castle instead. Marco tries to take off as the castle vines, um… assemble themselves into a giant dragon with the whole castle as its body. The dragon is identified by the kid as the titular King of Thorn. That’s all the relevance the title gets.
The helicopter crashes, not because of anything the vine dragon does, but because crazy lady has an attack of crazy. She pulls a gun on Marco to try to force him to not go to Kasumi’s rescue, but then remembers she has a terminal disease and starts coughing, firing off random bullets into the controls. Everybody survives the crash, but after protecting the Kid through it, she goes and turns to stone. Both of them are essentially out of the story, it’s just Marco and Kasumi at this point.
Kasumi is dead set on castle, and heads in, Despite the place rolling out the unwelcome mat, Marco runs in after her.
There is a fair chunk of movie left here. And once Kasumi enters the castle, the audience is no longer really privy to the knowledge of what imagery being displayed is dreams, illusions, or taking place in physical reality. We get multiple, nearly constant fake-outs where it seems like Kasumi is in the pod dreaming, or that she’s just waking up again, loads of flashbacks, and plenty of false presences.
Since they’re also separated on the inside, I’ll start with Marco. His job at this point is to get to the depths and shut down the Alice AI who was technically guiding them through having implanted all that knowledge in the Kid via hypnosis. He gets there, and faces off against a perfect recreation of his dead and beloved sister, who is also Alice, flipping between using her personality as well as her image, and talking like an AI. Also she’s an antagonist who arranged everything and even picked out the seven “survivors” to more or less follow horror tropes, now intending to kill Marco because his role is done.
Eventually, Marco realizes that, since he was a replacement, they shouldn’t have data on his dead sister hangup, he intuits that the microchip injection pointedly shown to the audience was a microchip injection, and shoots himself in the neck to shoot the chip out of his body, so that he can see that the avatar that had his sister’s face is actually a mass of vines that he shoots and kills so he can format c:/ Alice. His big win is pressing a holographic button on the computer senselessly under a random floor tile.
Anyway, Kasumi’s side! As I mentioned, she keeps getting yanked around between dreams, waking, going to sleep in the pod, seeing thorn vines, not seeing thorn vines, that flash of her sister backed by golden light as the thorns appeared that we only saw because the wormy guy flashed back to it… yeah, it’s a chaotic mess. This eventually leads to her finding herself in the room where her sister, who we have been lead to believe was taken by the company to serve as Alice 2.0, is laid out on an operating table covered in thorn vines and also a projected dream avatar of said sister, made of vines mostly, tries to keep Kasumi from reaching said sister.
Kasumi does not have a very good time of it.
After she screams well enough, she wakes up in a different version of the secret central base with her sister, only to realize her sister has the wrist scar she should have and she doesn’t while the avatar begs her to not remember. Did they switch places? No, it’s stranger than that. It’s revealed that the sister is the sister (so why does she have the scar?) but that, before everyone was set to sleep, Kasumi had an epic level freak out trying to convince her sister, who she felt guilty for hurting, to take her place in the pod. This happened on a sea cliff because see my early comment about how this company really could have picked cheaper real estate, and the uncoordinated scuffle resulted in Kasumi falling to her death on the rocks below. The Kasumi we’ve been following this whole movie was the dream-recreation of Kasumi produced by her sister who went dream-manifesting rather than turn-to-stone because of the emotional pain of killing the original Kasumi.
What.
Anyway, this revelation causes Sister Prime Alice 2 No Longer Human Electric Boogaloo III of the Thorn Vines to discorpreate. The dragon dies, the castle slowly falls from the sky, Marco gets over being shot and stabbed to catch Kasumi (fake). Also the vines catch them to put them down nicely rather than letting them fall to their deaths, before the vines turn to stone and crumble. Marco dies anyway, and Kasumi and the Kid head off into their uncertain future. The End.
This week’s deadly sin is poor pacing. King of Thorn is a movie I’ve had the vague desire to watch for years, probably for longer than I’ve been running this blog. Why? It’s all down to the poster, which has this incredible color and atmosphere, showing Kasumi looking sad but also peaceful in a classic peril pose tied up by thorn vines. I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but the cover is the first and most core bit of marketing a book does so credit when that’s excellent.
King of Thorn is not what that imagery implied. It’s noise. Constant noise both conceptual, with the never-ending barrage of twists and times to run, and literal with how much of the movie gets eaten by the excessive number of action beats.
I can’t help but feel that a movie was the wrong format for this story. I looked it up and King of Thorn started life as a manga, one that has six volumes. Six volumes is a little light for a twelve episode TV series, but it’s also a little heavy for a two hour movie. Without actually cracking into the manga, though, I can’t say whether or not it was any better paced.
From the movie we got, it feels instead like it wanted to be a video game, probably a survival horror in which the first half of the movie would probably be the majority of the game. The party getting constantly jumped by Demonsauruses isn’t great in the film, but if you had to sneak or fight your way around the labyrinth, knowing they were out there as you both searched for answers and a way out? It could be fairly compelling.
But that’s a distraction from my real job here: rating this film. And I hate to do this, but King of Thorn is going to get a D+ from me. It just isn’t something I can recommend in good faith. The set designs can be gorgeous, but you never get a chance to appreciate them. The characters could be interesting, but they don’t have the time to grow organically and so end up as these generic roles. The plot is insane, it needs medication.
If you want to see this thing, essentially the whole thing, done a semblance of right though? There is A.I.C.O. Incarnation. If you want to know why, go read my review on that one. Otherwise just watch it. Or don’t, but avoid King of Thorn.