Zombie 108 (2012)

A scientist creates a deadly virus that unfortunately gets released after a tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan. The virus spreads all over the world and turns people into the living dead. In an unknown city somewhere in Taiwan, SWAT teams are called in to evacuate civilians from an infected area. They cross swords with an armed gang who are unaware of the danger they’re in and refuse to move. An armed battle commences between the two until they have to join forces when a horde of zombies arrive on the scene. In the midst of this chaos, a strange perverted man is kidnapping women and keeping them locked inside his basement cell for his own sick pleasure, a young mother who was trying to leave the city with her young daughter being his latest victim. Will she able to escape from this monster?

Hailed as being the first Taiwanese zombie movie ever made, perhaps the young director that made this shouldn’t have bothered in hindsight as this is one of the worst Asian movies I’ve had the misfortune of watching and I can’t believe I wasted 86 mins of my life with this piece of junk. It’s hard to even find anything positive to say about it. The trailer makes it look like a good movie but believe me it’s not. The plot is hardly new or original borrowing many elements from other zombie movies. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Director Joe Chien has made this movie into an incoherent mess and it feels like it’s been made by an amateur. It’s all over the place. There’s no atmosphere or a feeling of dread associated with the story, all Chien cares about is giving the viewer some nasty rapes, a little bit of gore and carnage. It’s like you’re watching two different movies which somehow ends being mashed up together in the end. There’s no structure in the story, it just moves from one random scene to the next with too many characters floating about. The director should have just focused on one main plot and concentrated on making it interesting. Is the movie also played for laughs at times? It’s hard to tell. You have to ask why did the director want to also rip off the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with his sleazy perverted female kidnapper that looks like Leatherface? The director himself plays this character. It feels like Chien made the decision to forget about the story and concentrate instead on the exploitation side. Perhaps he was aiming for a certain type of viewer with this old school Cat III style movie and not for the general masses? With the amount of nudity by the women and the sleaze on display it appears to be the case. The pace of the movie is fast but the way the movie has been shot is quite distracting to watch. The special effects given that it’s a low budget production is passable enough but if you’re after a ton of bloodletting you’re going to get disappointed. The death metal soundtrack the viewer is subjected to over the course of the movie gets annoying very quickly and worse of all the acting by the entire cast is atrocious. The script is very badly written. Chien also finds it necessary to put some anti-Japan propaganda in this movie as well which should have really been left out. Fine, everybody knows about the tension between China and Japan at the moment but politics shouldn’t have a place in a movie like this.

Do yourself a favour and avoid this movie like the plague. I can’t tell you enough how bad it is. A complete and utter failure. A disaster all round. I cannot recommend this to anybody.

Sadako’s Rating: 1 star out of 5

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Junk (2000)

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

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Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay (1991)

A meteorite crashes into Tokyo Bay enveloping the city in a strange fog. The fallout from the meteor makes the dead come back to life as flesh eating zombies and chaos reigns supreme. A state of martial law is declared and punk gangs roam the streets. A young girl K-ko is given a mission by her father, Colonel Kirihara to find a Human Hunter Unit which is going around killing both zombies and humans. The HHU is disrupting rescue operations and must be destroyed. K-ko is given a special modified “battle suit” left by her father with special weapons and an Uzi machine gun to aid her. She finds out that the HHU led by a sadistic military general is conducting human experiments using a chemical to create an army of half human half zombies for his world domination plans. It’s up to K-ko to stop him but he has a specialist team of 4 mutant girls ready to thwart her plans.

Created by the man who directed the gore splatter movies Entrails Of A Virgin/Beautiful Woman, this is quite a disappointing zombie movie. You’d think the premise of having a young beautiful girl put in an special body armour suit with an uzi and going around blasting the hell out of a load of zombies would be a sure-fire winner for fans of the genre but unfortunately it isn’t. The biggest problem is not a lot of zombies are featured in the movie. There isn’t even that much gore shown. There’s a couple of decapitations and some zombies attacks but you’re lucky to count those scenes on one hand. I did expect this movie to be very violent and graphic with a lot of blood and guts. The zombies themselves when they do show up are rather Romero-esque in appearance so the make-up effects is pretty good. The movie concentrates too much on the mad general and his 4 female mutant henchmen  – cast offs from the group KISS I imagine judging by their looks (one of them is a rip-off of Richard Keel’s Jaws from the Bond movies with her steel teeth and a matching steel clawed hand!). The apocalyptic look and feel of the movie is fairly good – it’s just a shame that everything else is so poor. I will give credit for the director in that with little budget he had he did try to be creative with some things.

The acting isn’t up to scratch at all but then again this is a low budget movie and I didn’t expect anything that good. Female pro wrestler (now retired but active at the time the movie was released) Cutie Suzuki lives up to her name as she is cute but her acting leaves a lot to be desired. It seems the director recruited a couple of her wrestling colleagues as the villains in the movie. Some wrestling moves are even incorporated into the action scenes – they are executed rather poorly I might add (a back breaker and a tombstone piledriver).

This short 74 min zombie movie is far from being the best in the genre but it’s not the worst either. If you don’t take it seriously you might enjoy it. I wouldn’t really go out of your way to buy this movie, rent it instead. This could have been such an awesome story had the filmmakers done it properly.

No trailer but here’s a clip from the movie:

Sadako’s Rating: 2 stars out of 5

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Girl’s Zombie (2011)

A beautiful young woman Maki and her 2 male associates steal a case full of money from some gangsters and head off to a wooded area where they intend to hide the money and come back for it when things have died down. It’s obvious the place is a favorite place for gangster to bury their victims when they discover a hand sticking out of the ground. One of the trio who’s digging the hole to hide the cash hits a green canister and some gas seeps out of it but thinks nothing about it. The 2 males quarrel about the money which results in them shooting each other dead. Maki buries both corpses along with the money and goes back to her apartment. The gangsters who were livid about losing their money somehow find Maki’s apartment and force her to accompany them to the woods to retrieve their loot. Unfortunately the gas that has escaped from the green canister has awoken the dead in the woods and they rise to feast on Maki and the 3 gangsters. They hold out in an old abandoned building but the zombies break into the place. It’s a battle for survival but who will survive?

Oh dear, where do I begin with this god forsaken terrible movie. It’s a very low budget horror/soft porn nonsense starring AV idol Laura Aoyoma. This movie is just an excuse for her to be shown topless or naked and sexually abused by various men at certain intervals in the movie. Laura does look good in her black mini-skirt and top I will give her that but she cannot act to save her life. The acting by all the cast is absolutely awful and the horror is basically non-existent. There’s absolutely no gore whatsoever in this movie. The script looks like it’s copied from several previous zombie movies. You’d expect some tension and suspense in a zombie outbreak movie but there’s none here at all. It has to be said that this could be the worst zombie movie ever. It’s my fault for thinking this would be a decent zombie horror.

I wish I could take back the 80 minutes I wasted on watching this claptrap and seen something better instead. Please don’t bother seeing this crap. You’ll thank me for it!

I can’t find a trailer for this movie.

Sadako’s Rating: 1 star out of 5

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Dead Rising (2010)

The opening finds a teenager stumbling across a playground filled with kids and their mothers. He’s not looking where he’s going but continuing into the street where he is promptly hit by a car. Horrified onlookers gather as the driver approaches the teen to see if he is okay. They did not count on the teen rising up and biting the motorist. Meanwhile, in an apartment across the city,  Shin and his wheelchair bound younger brother are taking steps to bail out of their place as it seems the whole city is under attack by zombies. They plan to take refuge at some of the city’s safe-houses but it turns out that all of the safe houses are full as they get turned downed at three of them. It’s getting dark and they need some shelter fast, as zombies get more vicious at sundown. Shin finds a warehouse that seems perfect. Stocked with all kinds of boxes and barrels, they should have all of the supplies they need until they can figure out what to do next. But this warehouse also happens to be the home of a small gang consisting of three guys and a girl. And they don’t appreciate the 2 brothers entering their territory. Shin decides to take on the entire gang as this will give his younger brother time to escape. But that’s the least of everybody’s problems as the zombies come into the warehouse after a car crashes through into the place. Now it’s a matter of survival.

Based on the CAPCOM game Dead Rising, this movie seems at times like you’re playing a video game from the first person perspective. The story is constantly chopped up by using a series of flashbacks plus it’s also uninteresting. You’re going backwards and forwards in time so much that by the end you will find it so annoying and irritating. The movie doesn’t deliver anything new in the genre and it’s just like any other generic zombie movie you may have seen. If you’re happy with that, then great you might take something from this movie. It’s a very low budget production, mostly set in one location (a big warehouse) and uses crappy CGI blood and effects. The acting is terrible and some of the dialogue especially from the lead gang member is cringeworthy. I have never played Dead Rising but I’ve read it was a pretty good game so this might be one of the worst game adaptations ever. It’s possible CAPCOM just threw this together in the hope that the fans would be stupid enough to buy any crap associated with the game as it’s obvious that no great thought whatsoever has gone into making this movie. More of a case of ‘let’s do something cheap and nasty’ and pray that somebody will like it.

I can’t recommend this except for Dead Rising fans who may enjoy seeing references from the game itself. If you want to watch a more entertaining zombie movie from Japan check out Tokyo Zombie or Wild Zero. I can’t believe I wasted 72 mins watching this piece of crap.

Sadako’s Rating: 1 star out of 5

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The Girls Rebel Force Of Competitive Swimmers (2007)

A mysterious virus is spreading through an all-girls high school turning pupils and teachers into blood crazed zombies. Only the school swimming team seem to be unaffected. It’s time for them to fight back using any weapons they can find.

It’s basically a low budget zombie flick with the swimming club taking on the teachers plus an evil master and dismembering them in various ways using chainsaws etc. Plenty of gore on display along with some nudity. Not to be taken seriously at all. It’s like a modern exploitation movie of sorts.

Sadako’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Tokyo Zombie (2005)

It seems there is a large mountain in Tokyo that is used solely for the purpose of discarding garbage as well as unwanted people. As the mountain grows larger, something causes those buried in it to return to life as flesh eating zombies. Fujio and Mitsuo work in a fire extinguisher factory and with loads of free time these two practice martial arts. What better way to train than to practice martial arts on the living dead?

Hilarious spoof zombie movie of two slackers who kill their boss and dump his body on a mountain of waste called Black Fuji. I found the part when the first victim of the zombie outbreak – a guy getting his dick bit off to be so funny. If you like Shaun Of The Dead then you’ll certainly like this movie.

Sadako’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Wild Zero (1999)

The ultimate trash b-movie of an invading UFO fleet resurrecting the dead as zombies. Enter J-rock group Guitar Wolf to save the day!

Part horror part comedy – this is a fun over the top movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. What a hilariously crazy ending. More importantly it’s proof that rock n roll can even save the planet from zombies!

Sadako’s Rating: 4 out of 5

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Uniform Survigirl I (2009)

17 year old schoolgirl Sakura visits a Samurai theme park called Survival Land with her friends where they’re supposed to go up against some cosplayers dressed as samurai but things go horribly wrong when one of the cosplayers gets infected after finding a strange flower in the theme park’s grounds and cutting it with his sword. Some black liquid sprays him in the face and the next thing we know he’s infecting the rest of his colleagues as they turn into zombies. Soon the game turns deadly as the undead cosplayers start attacking the girls with real weapons. They need to find a way to escape from the place and fast…..

I was really disappointed with this zombie movie. I thought that the combination of cute Japanese schoolgirls, a samurai theme park and zombies would be great. How wrong I was! Poor acting, shitty storyline and the special effects was crap. There’s hardly any blood and guts and what little there is isn’t very good. Some of the sequences made me shake my head: for example one of the girls is slit across the throat by a knife and there’s a spray of blood against a building but when you look at the wound itself there’s only a tiny scratch. Hardly enough for the deluge of blood that appeared on screen. Another laughable example is near the climax as another girl has a chainsaw to protect her from a zombie. We can hear the noise of a chainsaw running but when you look at it in the girls’s hands it’s quite clearly switched off. Just little things like that made this movie so bad. Sure, the cast are kawaii but if you can’t act then that’s not going to save a movie. I’ll probably watch the sequel just to see if there’s any improvement. Don’t bother with this unless you’re desperate.

Sadako’s Rating: 1.5 out of 5

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