We’re kicking off with the latest pulse-pounding thriller from South Korean action maestro Ryoo Seung-wan. Streaming now on Netflix, Humint takes us to Vladivostok, where a South Korean agent (Zo In-sung) and a North Korean official (Park Jeong-min) find themselves in a deadly game of "human intelligence" gone wrong.

• Fun Flix Fact: This film completes director Ryoo’s "Overseas Location" trilogy, following The Berlin File and Escape from Mogadishu. If you love the kinetic "gun-fu" of John Woo, you’ll notice several stylistic nods—Ryoo has described this film as his ultimate homage to the Hong Kong action legend!

• Production Trivia: To get that authentic, gritty feel of the North Korea-Russia border, the production spent months filming in extreme cold. The cast reportedly had to use special heated suits under their costumes to keep their muscles from seizing up during those breathless hand-to-hand fight scenes.

To celebrate a decade of South Korean cinematic excellence, we’re revisiting the 2016 masterpiece The Wailing. It’s the film that took the "possession" genre, mixed it with police procedural and folk horror, and left us all staring at the screen in stunned silence.

• The Ritual: The intense, bone-shaking shaman ritual scene took four days to film. Actor Hwang Jung-min performed the sequence with such intensity that many of the extras—and even some of the crew—felt physically unsettled, wondering if they were accidentally summoning something real!

For this week's Hidden Gem, we’re recommending the gnarly "family horror" flick Dust Bunny. It marks the feature directorial debut of Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) and stars the incomparable Mads Mikkelsen as a hitman who is hired by an eight-year-old girl to kill the monster under her bed.

• Fun Flix Fact: This is a mini Hannibal reunion! Fuller wrote the role of the hitman specifically for Mads Mikkelsen. When Mads read the script, his only note was that his co-star, Sophie Sloan, was so good he wanted her to keep her thick Scottish accent—but she ended up teaching herself a perfect American accent via TikTok in just two weeks!

• Visual Magic: The film was heavily inspired by the "Amblin" era of the 80s (The Goonies, Gremlins). To capture that "scary-but-enchanted" look, the production team used practical puppets for the "Dust Bunny" monster, ensuring that when it rises from the floorboards, it has a terrifying, tangible weight.

And if that’s not enough entertainment for you, we’ve even thrown in new trailers to watch and what you can catch on streaming. 

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00:00 Intro 

2:58 Shoutouts

5:27 Movie News

14:05 New on Streaming

16:56 New Trailers

26:14 Anniversary Corner

29:29 Humint Review

38:23 Hidden Gem (Dust Bunny)

44:23 Outro

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