Zombie Fight Club review: An average zombie movie that has some moments of fun.
Zombie Fight Club review
Director: Joe Chien
Cast: Andy On, Jessica Cambensy, Jack Kao
Certificate: 18
Running Time: 95 minutes
Synopsis: A new drug turns a crime riddled apartment building’s residents into flesh-hungry zombies.
Zombie Fight Club has no discernible plot. An unconnected sequence of events happen in rapid succession, and then everyone just starts killing each other.
The first hour is spent in an apartment building and plays out a little how The Raid might have done if it had occurred in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. During this section we are shown several clusters of characters who have no real bearing on one another, never meet and don’t last very long. The few that do either have no development or they change so much that it’s a struggle to remember who they were in the first place. For example, a kind and gentle school teacher barricades himself and some students in his house only to later butcher his wards and becomes a sex-mad dictator.
It takes us over an hour of the ninety minute run time to get to the titular Zombie Fight Club and even that isn’t entirely what the name suggests. Set a year after the events taking place within the apartment block, groups of survivors are pitted against cages of zombies and forced to fight their way to victory in order to live another day in a cage. It attempts to channel the gladiatorial times of Ancient Rome, but comes off as a really cheap UFC bout. Our two main characters, if you can call them that, find themselves in this situation though it’s never explained how they got there, they are simply there and fighting.
The basic rushed narrative could be forgiven, it is a zombie film after all. Granted I know that most of them these days strive for an engaging story and imaginative zombies but most are just all about the bloody battles and Zombie Fight Club has them in spades. It has some very bloody and grotesque set pieces and gore fans will be happy.
Once you push back all the viscera and offal and confusing plot you arrive at the films biggest failing, how overtly sexualised everything is. Horror and sex have gone together since the genre began, apparently there’s nothing folks enjoy more than some blood-soaked boobs, but Zombie Fight Club takes it all to an extreme that is unnecessary.
I’m sure Zombie Fight Club will play well with the right audience but in this day and age it’s very disappointing to see that none of the female characters are given anything to do other than either look frightened or take their clothes off.
Zombie Fight Club review
There are many pretty Asian actresses featured and whilst I’m sure they have great talent, sadly they aren’t given the opportunity to do much more than parade around in underwear, fetish-wear or get used for sex by their male counterparts. All the flesh and sex on display will thrill teenage boys, with the added zombie violence factor, it’s a teenage boys wet dream.
In parts it feels like it might be trying to tap into the sexploitation films of old but the vision isn’t quite achieved, the result is more akin to a rape-fuelled anime. Viewers be warned, Zombie Fight Club has more rape, both male and female, than an episode of Game of Thrones.
If you can suppress all the sexual imagery and violence, Zombie Fight Club manages to pass as an average zombie movie that has some moments of fun. Overall though, it’s a bloody messy affair.
Zombie Fight Club review, Kat Hughes, August 2015.
Zombie Fight Club screens on Friday 28th August at 10:45pm.
