Sweet Home “Episode 1”

OK, why am I watching Sweet Home?  I saw it was on Netflix, got the impression is was something of a hit (two more seasons are on the way), and I needed something for Fridays until Doom Patrol comes back.

Besides, a horror series about people who turn into monsters might just be my cup o’ tea.  I mean, I liked that one other South Korean show I watched in Netflix.  OK, that was Squid Game, and I think it is safe to say that Sweet Home is no Squid Game.

That doesn’t make it bad.

Sweet Home is set in a South Korean apartment building in the year 2020 when a weird disease of some kind forces the residents inside into a quarantine.

Well, that might have been unintended.  Or it might not have.

As it is, the pilot shows a flash forward where one resident, teenage boy Cha Hyun-soo, is trying to get past a lot of soldiers trying to pump him full of lead…and he doesn’t seem to be all that affected.  That’s a bit ironic given that for most of the episode, he wishes he was dead since he, and he alone, survived something that killed the rest of his family.  In the rest of the episode, when he’s moving into the building alone and trying to avoid, oh, everybody, he does seem to be a bit interested in Lee Eun-yoo, a young girl with some ballet training.

There are a few other noteworthy residents, and I’ll probably have more to say about them in future installments.  But something hits the building, and some of the residents turn into, well, other things, often starting with a massive nosebleed, the sort that is far too bloody to be real.  I’m talking Evil Dead sort of blood geysers.

What happens after that?  Well, Hyn-soo sees one neighbor feeling a lot of hunger, even eating a cat (the head rolled loose before she pulled it back and presumably ate that too).

And on the ground floor, Eun-yoo’s older brother, a calm medical student who recognizes what’s going wrong before anyone else does, teaming with former firefighter Seo Yi-kyung, use a fire extinguisher and some quick action to drive a former human out of the building.  This one looked to be over seven feet tall with an extra large head, even larger mouth, and a very long tongue that can drain the blood out of a human body in a matter of seconds.  The residents are trapped inside, and while the initial assumption is there was only one creature outside in the courtyard, it soon turns out there are a lot of them out there, attacking other people (and each other), and generally being horrifying.  Plus, they seem to come in many different shapes and sizes.

Oh, and Hyan-soo’s nose just started gushing.

I think I am going to enjoy this.