A team of soldiers are sent to collect a truck full of money from the Korean peninsula, and encounter zombies and much more.

Sequels generally get a bad name. To be fair, there is reason for that. Some films exist as perfect one-offs, single moments in movie time which cannot be matched, far less bettered, and in which the whole story which needed told has already been told. And yet Easy Rider: The Ride Back and The Birds 2: Land’s End are out there (for download only, I hope – surely nobody would waste the Earth’s precious resources on putting them on Blu-ray?).

And even if there is more story to be told, did anyone ever really need Halloween 6 or Amityville 3D? You’d think not, but there they are. Not everything can be The Empire Strikes Back, after all, but there’s clearly money to be made in flogging a whole series of long-dead horses.

But even in the pantheon of ill-judged, money grabbing, thoughtless sequelry, some films stand out more than others. Son of the Mask, for instance, in which the writers decided that the lack of Jim Carrey was no impediment to a movie whose success completely relied on, well, Jim Carrey. Or Speed 2: Cruise Control, where the producers decided a cruise boat chuntering slowly about the Caribbean was just as exciting as a hell for leather bus ride through the city with a bomb on board.

I’d always assumed these two ‘gems’ would never be challenged for title of Worst Sequel Ever. I should have known better.

Train to Busan: Peninsula is a movie so utterly wrong in every respect, that it’s genuinely a struggle to believe it’s the same director and writer as did the original movie. There are lots of things to love in the first film – the believable emotional core at its centre, the subtle (and not so subtle) social commentary, the brilliant physical transformations, the claustrophobic setting packed with fast moving zombies, the ingenuous ways our heroes survived (or did not), the tight focus throughout. Unfortunately, director Yeon Sang-Ho and writer Park Joo-suk have decided that none of that really mattered, and what was really needed in the sequel was ‘Mad Max with Occasional Zombies’.

All focus is lost in a welter of over-bearing incidental music, (bad) CGI-heavy chase sequences and Thunderdome-style death battles, the entirety taking place in an off-the-rack post-apocalyptic Korean city, complete with ruined buildings (did the city of Incheon somehow get bombed as well as infested with zombies, because a lot of these buildings are in pieces), widespread graffiti (you’d think that the few human survivors trapped in the city would have better things to do with their time than petty vandalism), and street after street filled with nose to tail, but conveniently parked to either side of the road, abandoned cars. There’s more scenes about violent gang politics than there are with zombies in them, and when the zombies do appear they’re usually either in Walking Dead-esque shuffling hordes or getting wiped out easily by any human with a gun or a handy truck (watch out too, for the A-Team levels of machine gun bullets being sprayed directly at people without hitting them).

It’d be easy to go on all day about the faults of this movie, both at the highest and lowest levels. Simpler, and quicker, though, just to say that for those who know only the current run of brilliant South Korean movies, topped off with last year’s Oscar winner Parasite, this will come as a massive disappointment. For those who remember the glut of bad Hollywood rip-offs which made up most of Korean cinema in previous decades, though, this is a return to the bad old days (complete with as many people speaking in English as can conceivably, if improbably, be squeezed in).

Verdict: It’s true that not every sequel can be The Empire Strikes Back, but do we really need another Attack of the Clones? 2/10

Stuart Douglas