South Korean film “Handsome Guys”, a remake of “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” (2010), attempts to transplant American horror elements to a new local background, and it succeeds to some degree in my inconsequential opinion. While mostly faithful to the original American version, the movie also tries to do several new stuffs to my little amusement, and the result often elicited laughs and chuckles from the audiences around me when I watched it at a local movie theater yesterday.

At the beginning, we are introduced to a couple of dudes who look rather unpleasant and suspicious on the surface. When these two guys happen to drop by a supermarket located in some country area, they come across a bunch of young people who come to the area for having a little rural vacation together, and they instantly give a bad impression to these young people.

However, these two dudes, Jae-pil (Lee Sung-min) and Sang-goo (Lee Hee-jun), are actually fairly nice guys who are sadly rather dim about how they often look to others. They simply come for buying a little house located in the middle of a nearby forest area, and, though it does not look exactly promising to say the least for many glaring reasons, they decide to buy it anyway because, as professional carpenters, they can fix here and there in the house while beginning to settle there.

Meanwhile, we also get to know a bit about those young people shown early in the story. As they have some fun during the following evening, their leader turns out to be quite an unpleasant lad, and Mi-na (Gong Seung-yeon), a young woman who happens to accompany him and his friends, becomes very angry and disappointed to know how she is actually disregarded by them. When she later comes to a nearby lake for letting out her feelings alone, Jae-pil and Sang-goo happen to be fishing right there, and, what do you know, they inadvertently causes a little unfortunate accident which leads to Mi-na becoming unconscious for a while.

Anyway, Sang-goo and Jae-pil take Mi-na to their house because any decent persons would do under this situation, and that is the beginning of a series of disastrous misunderstandings. Just because it looks like Jae-pil and Sang-soo kidnap her, the rest of her group attempt to ‘rescue’ Mi-na, and the leader is particularly concerned about his smartphone which happens to be in her possession. This smartphone contains some very sensitive materials which can ruin his life and career once for all if they ever get leaked in public, and he is already quite determined to retrieve it by any means necessary.

What follows next is not so far from the original American version, though the movie presents these expected moments with a bit of extra creativity. I did laugh as observing how a certain comic scene involved with a hidden hornet’s nest handled with a bit more shock and laugh, and I was not certainly disappointed at all in case of the hilariously gory moment involved with a woodchipper, which takes me back to that infamous scene in the Coen Brothers’ great film “Fargo” (1996) again.

Meanwhile, the movie gradually begins to take a different route during its second part. If “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” lampoons “Friday the 13th” (1980) and its countless sequels and imitators, “Handsome Guys” goes for Sam Raimi’s little cult horror film “Evil Dead” (1981) and its many other variations out there. As already shown to us in advance, the house has the basement full of disturbing stuffs including what is clearly a portal to Hell, and a certain powerful dark force naturally starts to gather around the house once the portal gets activated step by step along the story.

Around the point where it pulls all the stops for more horror and laugh, the movie becomes rather shaky with low-budget special effects, but it continues to amuse us mainly thanks to the solid comic performances from its several main cast members. As the South Korean variation of hillbilly characters, Lee Sung-min and Lee Hee-jun look convincing in their deliberately shabby appearance, and their comic chemistry is as effective as Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk in the original American version. Jae-pil and Sang-goo are sometimes silly and pathetic, but they somehow come to us as likable guys, even though we shake our head for their total obliviousness to how they do not look as handsome as they think.

Between her two co-stars, Gong Seung-yeon holds her own spot well in addition to playing her role as straight as possible, and Park Ji-hwan and Lee Kyu-hyung are well-cast as a couple of local policemen who gets deeply involved into Sang-goo and Jae-pil’s increasingly messy circumstance. The special mention goes to a dog which plays Sang-goo’s pet dog, and it always steals the show from the human performers in the film for its plain cuteness.

On the whole, “Handsome Guys”, which is directed and written by Nam Dong-hyub, is a fairly watchable remake mainly thanks to the good efforts from its main cast members. I give it 2.5 stars because 1) I gave “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” 3 stars and 2) it is not as refreshing as that in addition to not being totally successful in its own variations in story and characters, but you may want to check it out someday if you enjoyed its original American version.