Reviewed By-Steve Genier
Directed By-Muroga Atsushi
Cast-Asano Nobuyuki, Ebara Osamu and Gouta Tate
Year: 1999
Think Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, mixing it with the Japanese Yakuza and you get a little feel for this wacked out action/crime/horror offering from SCORE director Muroga Atsushi. There's plenty of guns, bullets, babes and guts splattered all over the screen during it's roughly 83 minutes or so. The government is....well a doctor in particular is experimenting with a new re-animation drug (sound familiar?) called DNX. His first test, his own wife. Damn drug works, but too good....turning wife into a super-zombie with brains! Small time thieves, create the heist of a life time by stealing millions of dollars worth of jewels. They contact a Japanese Yakuza outfit to collect some dough, the meeting place, an old abandoned factory of sorts. The real question here is it abandoned? Sparks begin to fly just before the big-payday, for the dead begin to pop up spoiling their fun and killing them one by one. Upon the Yakuza's arrival, they believe they have the upper hand by stiffing the thieves out of their money, but they too have a surprise heading their way. The only way to stop the spread of the walking dead is to blow the place sky high, but there's one thing that's stopping that from happening, remember super-zombie?
The mixture of non-stop action and blood-letting gore keep this zombie-fest in high gear, leaving the viewer in ah. Special effects display the next step in zombie films, the certain realism of blood and guts is not one for the weak in the stomach. The level of gut-munching in this film equals that of many of the most gory living dead flicks out there. The zombies also moved around quite convincingly, very slow and walking around aimlessly. The general theme of this film seemed to flow quite well except for the interaction between the Japanese characters and the American characters. The snag being a lack of continuity, at times they would be communicated with each other in their own languages at times and still being able to understand each other. I found this rather odd considering the vast differences in the two tongues. All that aside, the action along with the gore contributed most effectively. Between the target practice with the zombies and the various all out bullets flying between gun battles is most entertaining. If any genre was to best describe this film, horror would be considered, but action tops the genre bill with the amount of stray bullets flying around. Hey, one can't forget the attraction to the female super-zombie....does that put you in the same category as a necrophiliac?
3 1/2 Bitch Slaps