Badland Hunters follows Hyung Nam-San, a fearless huntsman living in a post-apocalyptic Seoul, who is on a mission to rescue the teenage Han Su-Na from a mad scientist. The film is available to stream on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
A great earthquake levels all of Seoul to the ground. Three years later, survivors die and kill even for barely drinkable water.
Hyung Nam-San lives in the Bus District where he sells meat from the animals he hunts along with his rookie and young partner, Choi Ji-Wan.
He has a special relationship with Han Su-Na, an 18-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother.
She looks like Nam-San’s late daughter and was saved by him, which is why she respects Nam-San so much.
One day, she and her grandmother are taken to Seoul by a volunteer group that claims they’ve built a safe haven specially meant for families with children below 20.
Soon, Nam-San and Ji-Wan discover that it is a sham and that Su-Na has been kidnapped by the men of Doctor Yang Gi-Su, a mad scientist doing horrible experiments on children.
They are joined by a former Air Force sergeant, Lee Eun-Ho, who tells them about the apartment and Gi-Su.
They then raid the headquarters of local gangs to secure ammunition and also an entry into the apartment building.
Meanwhile, Su-Na tries her best to escape her fate after learning of the horrors there. However, she gets captured by Gi-Su who begins subjecting her to his experiments.
The trio arrives and wreaks great havoc at the building. Gi-Su suffers a severe blow when Su-Na’s intelligence ends up becoming a great obstacle.
He causes great pain one last time before meeting a bloodied end.
Thanks to Nam-San, who, along with his two other friends, freed the survivors of the apartment.
Eun-Ho stays while Nam-San and the kids return home, as Badland Hunters rolls the credits.
Ending explained:
Who is Yang Gi-Su?
The primary antagonist in Badland Hunters, Yang Gi-Su is a mad scientist who conducts a series of horrific experiments to revive his dying daughter.
He wants to make a human body capable of regenerating itself like reptiles.
His reptilian regeneration experiments entail inhumane horror and take hundreds of children’s lives, even before the great earthquake.
In a post-apocalyptic Seoul, he arrives at an apartment building that has been revived with the joint effort of survivors and an Air Force Unit.
He begins his experiments on the children there, and most of the unit helps him with the experiments, as they all make use of their new bodies with reptilian regenerative abilities.
He makes them believe in his vision of taking this unethical step toward a new evolutionary biological reality, where the human body would be capable of surviving dehydration and malnutrition.
But his experiments are far from success and a staggering amount of children and teenagers have been sacrificed for them.
By the end of Badland Hunters, he has sacrificed dozens upon dozens of children and teenagers’s lives, in addition to the hundred-plus deaths his experiments caused before the earthquake.
Where is Han Su-Na taken to?
Han Su-Na and her grandmother are taken to the apartment in Seoul by Teacher, a lady who leads what she calls the volunteer group of the organization she works for.
In reality, she is a blind follower of Yang Gi-Su and works as a teacher for the teenagers she helps traffic into the apartment through deceit and fake promises.
On the way there, Han Su-Na’s grandmother is escorted to a medical station when she starts falling due to exhaustion. However, she is only escorted to a remote place and killed.
Su-Na reaches the apartment and on the way, she also befriends Lee Ju-Ye, another eighteen-year-old girl like her.
She immediately becomes suspicious of the apartment and Yang Gi-Su.
The tenants there take part in contests, winning which earns them an apartment room of their own.
The parents are kept in the lower sections where they work hard shifts to make potable drinking water for their children, who are separated from them and live on the eighth floor.
Who is Lee Eun-Ho?
Meanwhile, her friends in the Bus District, hunters Hyung Nam-San and Choi Ji-Wan learn about the apartment and the men who are hard to kill.
Nam-San, a former boxer and a formidable fighter, is joined by Ji-Wan, his son-like young partner who has a crush on Su-Na, as well as a former Air Force sergeant, Lee Eun-Ho.
The sergeant used to be a part of the Air Force unit back at the apartment building, before learning about the horrific reality of Gi-Su’s experiments and rebelling against it.
When the two badland hunters fight the two volunteer group members who kill Su-Na’s grandmother, they find that the men come back alive even after being killed.
Eun-Ho helps them kill the men, who were her former colleagues at the unit, for good.
She tells them that to kill them properly, their heads need to be cut off, before revealing her past, details about the apartment, and the experiments of Yang Gi-Su.
Does Han Su-Na survive?
The teenagers there wear a blank, morose look on their faces and all of them have incision marks behind their ears.
They’re given special water bottles and food, but Su-Na doesn’t consume any of it. She later tries to escape and sneaks into Gi-Su’s office.
She looks at his file that contains the proof of his experiments, failures, and deaths of his subjects. She later hides in a corner and witnesses him killing Ju-Ye’s parents.
She later gets captured by him and he straps her into the bed to begin the process of extracting the regenerative fluid.
However, since she didn’t drink any water, the material that’s extracted from her only ruins the dose and when he injects it, he becomes infected and starts convulsing.
He tries to escape and also blows up the room where she is kept, but Choi Ji-Wan makes it in time and protects her from the blast.
Gi-Su makes a run for it but is confronted by the parents who attack him for rendering their children emotionless and docile.
He retaliates by blindly open-firing, killing many, including his own daughter, who was encased inside a briefcase.
However, before he can shoot at Han Su-Na, Nam-San shoots him dead. Badland Hunters ends with Han Su-Na, Hyung Nam-San, and Choi Ji-Wan returning to Bus District.
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