Director: Ming Jin Woo
Year: 2013
Country: Malaysia
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
After a series of strange encounters, a group of friends find themselves stuck in a rapidly-spreading zombie invasion throughout the city as more and more citizens succumb to the deadly virus, forcing a lazy slacker to pick up the pieces and help his friends get away from the creatures safely.
Review:
This was a decent if problematic horror/comedy. One of the better elements here is the openly fun nature of the way the group gets the setup here to turn us onto them. Some of these scenes and counters turn out to be genuinely funny as the manner of sowing them to be a fun-loving, easy-going group that can hangout and joke with each other, such as we see in the opening where they rag on each other so much they fail to notice the rabid dog in the street with them, which creates the kind of easy-going connection to the group. Given that the majority of these scenes provide some fine comedic elements including the goofy characters, rapid-fire lines of dialog and just absurd situations that usually result from these kinds of efforts. That also makes for quite a light-hearted and silly which enables all the fun to come about.
Even with the lighter approach, the zombie action here is quite fun. The numerous amount of encounters throughout here, from the zombies overrunning the school featuring the spread of the virus through the faculty attacking each other in front of the kids and then the rest of the swarm spreading out to the various street performers around the building, to the ambush at the cemetery as well as the various rescue attempts to grab the others out of hiding and take them to safety allow for a wholly enjoyable time here. The continuous amount of action is rather thrilling as there are plenty of encounters between the group and the creatures as they attempt to combat the overriding amount of creatures in the building which leads into the wholly original and somewhat creative manner of dealing with the creatures as this is perfectly in tone with the silliness of the rest of the film. Given that the zombies look quite impressive in their detail and manage to look quite impressive as well, there's a lot to really like with this one.
Still, there are some problems with the film. The main issue is surprisingly the comedy, which is the true definition of hit-or-miss. The main aspect of driving the comedy in the film is people seemingly unaware they're interacting with the zombies, this requires most of the people here to be moronically stupid for failing to see the obvious and then causing them to get attacked as a result. This is compounded with a preponderance of the rapid-fire dialog, mugging for the camera or goofy accents even in their natural dialect creates the vast majority of the comedy elements here and it's light-hearted in tone to generate laughs in the proper mindset yet completely individualistic in execution. Beyond that, the light-hearted tone manages to really downplay a lot of the severity of the situation since the mandates involved in the filming mean a lot of what goes on in here isn't serious so there's no real damage to anything or anything as a result of this. However, it's not that bad overall and has a lot to like.
Overview: ***1/2/5
Given that the film does have some minor issues in the comedic approach and some cultural differences that might be played up more than expected, there's still a lot to really enjoy here. Certainly worth a look for Asian zombie fanatics, those curious about the country's genre output or looking for more of this style, while those who are burnt out on these films or looking for more serious entries should heed caution.
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