In a top secret US military facility situated in an old abandoned factory on the island of Okinawa, an American doctor is dabbling with a chemical called DNX which is supposed to bring the dead back to life but with some horrific side effects in that they come back as flesh eating zombies. A distress signal is picked up by the US military top brass from the secret base and Dr Nakada who once worked on developing DNX is called in by them to go to the base and shut the place down by activating a bomb which will blow the whole facility. Meanwhile, across town a gang of thieves stage an outrageous heist at a jewel store and steal more than 100,000,000 million yen in jewellery. The gang have set a deal up with the local yakuza so that in exchange for the jewellery they will get some cash. The location for the deal is unfortunately in the same abandoned factory where a zombie outbreak has started. It’s now a battle of survival for the thieves as the zombies start attacking them but they also didn’t count on a female zombie who is displaying far more intelligence than your average undead person. Will any of the thieves manage to escape and can Dr Nakada destroy the base before the local town is overrun by zombies?
A lot of zombie movies made during the past 10 years or so have had their formula tweaked a little bit so that they appear to be different from other generic undead flicks (fast zombies, zombie comedies etc) but sometimes it’s just nice to watch a good old fashioned zombie movie which more or less sticks to the vision that George Romero came up with (with just a little dose of Re-Animator) and Junk is one such movie. Unfortunately Junk had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as Versus. Versus had zombies but they weren’t the slow shuffling zombies of old and anyway Versus was more of a fighting movie than a proper zombie splatterfest. Not that there’s anything wrong with Versus (I loved it) but a lot of people including the critics ignored this movie and showered all the praise on Versus instead. Thankfully over the past decade, Junk has garnered a bit of a cult following and is now starting to be appreciated by J-horror fans. If it’s blood and guts you want, this movie has it in droves and it feels very much like what the Italians such as Lucio Fulci were producing during the late 70’s/early 80’s. Add some gun-play and nudity and you have the ingredients for Junk. Director Atsushi Murogi makes sure the action comes thick and fast with plenty of gory effects which is well done e,g brilliant brain splatter from gun shots and organs dangling from wounds. For a low budget horror the special effects personnel excelled themselves. It’s only during the final third that things get a little bit silly when you have a super intelligent female zombie on the rampage and no matter how many times she gets offed (yes she even shot in the head which should kill your average zombie) she comes back for more!
The storyline whilst not exactly groundbreaking is pretty simple and the acting is decent enough with two strong female characters. Once again it’s the Westerners in the movie that lets the side down. In nearly every Japanese movie I’ve seen which features American actors they just can’t seem to act properly and this movie is no exception. The couple of men here who play American soldiers are unbearably bad. It might have been better to replace them with Japanese actors! Even so the Japanese guy playing Dr Nakada also get in on the act and fails badly with his English dialogue. I had a hard time trying to understand what the hell he was trying to say!
It was a shame that Junk was such a short movie (82 mins) as I wanted to see more. As a zombie movie it doesn’t fail to entertain and Asian gorehounds will find a lot to like in this movie. I could’ve been really picky and mention the many plotholes I saw in the movie but I wasn’t really too bothered about them. All I wanted to do was sit down and be entertained by a fun zombie movie and it did just that. It delivers what zombie fans would expect. I really enjoyed it. Recommended.
Sadako’s Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Sadako's Movie Shack 
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