Zombie Fight Club (2014)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Andy On, Jessica C., Michael Wong, Terence Yin
Directed by Joe Chien
Zombie 108 director Joe Chien heads back to the undead apocalypse for Zombie Fight Club. This time, the film kicks off with a group of heavily armed cops heading to bust a drug cartel in a slum-like apartment building – all very The Raid in style.
Meanwhile, inside the building, a bunch of rappers and their friends find themselves in a spot of bother when the group of prostitutes they have with them suddenly turn into flesh-eating ghouls due to tainted drugs. As dicks are bitten off and heads bashed in, the cops meet the full resistance of their drug-dealing enemies in a shootout that sees most of the crew dead and those in charge revealing themselves as crooked coppers out for one thing – drug money.
All of this, of course, comes together as the zombie infection spreads and various residents of the building meet their ends. One such victim is the boyfriend of Jenny (Jessica C.), whose demise leads Jenny to team up with nice guy cop Andy (Andy On) in an attempt to escape the building before they all become chow for the zombies closing in on all sides.
It all sounds much better than it actually is, being something of a mish-mash of The Raid and the infinitely superior The Horde for the first half of the film. Obnoxious use of digital blood spray is a frequent annoyance, and few of the characters are loaned any particular amount of time to get to know them before the carnage starts – Chien opting, instead, to rely on the score to probe emotional connection.
It doesn’t.
A few action sequences are impressive, but it feels like one over-the-top big idea churned out after another with hardly any effort to glue them together. Super-zombies with fanged mouths in their torsos like something out of The Thing, a lame elderly neighbour with power armour legs and a car somehow stored on the internal middle floor of the apartment complex – which is then used to smash through brick walls and emerge to apparent safety outside(!) – are just some of things thrown thick and fast at you in Zombie Fight Club‘s first half. But, crucially, it just never feels particularly fun or in any way lighthearted enough to work – a tonality that creeps into the visuals, seeing everything in the building bathed in a drab green filter.
And then the film completely changes. Around the hour mark, it becomes apparent that all of the action inside the building was simply laying the groundwork for the final post-apocalyptic act. Here, the villain is an ex-teacher – once resident in the old apartment building – who now lives as a despotic leader with his zombified daughter at his side (painting direct shades of The Walking Dead‘s Governor).
Andy and Jenny are amongst the unfortunates relegated to slavery in this new dystopia, forced to fight as combatants in gladiatorial combat against the undead for the amusement, and profit, of their leaders and owners. Whilst Chien throws in his most stylish and bone-crunching martial arts and fight sequences – not to mention some really cool zombie designs and effects – during this second half, the narrative momentum grinds to a halt.
A bid for freedom for Andy and Jenny is obviously on the cards, but while the action again comes to the forefront, the characters feel buried beneath it all – lost once more under an inescapable downpour of ideas as their society’s own house of cards also crumbles. Constant switching between English and Mandarin Chinese dialogue adds to the perplexingly jumbled feeling.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t anything to like about Zombie Fight Club. It features a pleasing amount of high-impact action and enough zombie mayhem and gore to make it worthwhile, not to mention a gleefully exploitative outlook, but it just can’t keep up with everything that it’s trying to do. It seems as though director Chien has tipped over a huge bucket of ideas with neither the resources nor talent to truly piece them together.
If you’ve time to waste on something new, then by all means give Zombie Fight Club a shot. Otherwise, just go ahead and have a double-bill of The Raid and The Horde instead.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
