You could be forgiven for thinking that whatever could be done with the zombie genre has been done by this point, but a viewing of The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (or Zombie For Sale, as it was titled at the screening I attended) proves this wrong. A deeply funny and ingenious spin on the idea of zombie as contagion, this is as much as anything else a film about family life in a provincial part of Korea – where the pace of life is far too sleepy and detached from the rest of the country for a zombie outbreak to get adequately dealt with. But, ever enterprising, what could have been a disaster for the Park family is rendered a boon. This rather troubled clan see their fate move quickly from the ridiculous to the sublime.
The source of the outbreak is not really the important thing, but for the record: big pharma are the bad guys here, and medical experiments gone wrong give rise to the not-quite-dead but certainly mindless, shambling zombies. One such zombie is a young man who finds his way out of some top-secret medical waste and makes his way to the Park family home – after wandering the back roads for a while first, where it seems zombies are afraid of dogs. Frightened of both the zombie and the dog, the Parks tie the boy up in one of their outbuildings (they run a petrol station, or did) whilst they think about what to do next. In the melee, the pater familias is bitten. You might think you know what is to follow, but out of nowhere the film delivers its first surprise: Man-deok doesn’t turn into a zombie himself. The film takes a turn towards Cocoon, as the zombie bite rejuvenates Man-deok, making him look and feel years younger. Before long, his friends all want a piece of the action and the Parks sense a business opportunity…meanwhile, teenage daughter Hae-gul takes quite a shine to the mute, cabbage-prone zombie boy, even christening him Jjong-bi (sounds an awful lot like ‘zombie’, see) and doing her best to make the lad remember his humanity.
This all sounds too good to be true and it is, but the gradual descent into more of a standard zombie fare is a very diverting journey which manages surprises all along the way. Knowing they are playing, essentially, a pack of ratbags, the Park clan play for laughs throughout – there is no glamour here, only a rather dour daughter-in-law, a sacked salaryman, an isolated teenage daughter, a chancer of a husband and an even bigger chancer of a grandpa; I had no idea that Korea was as fond of pratfalling and other physical humour as we Brits, but the film is very much a physical comedy and this is a good match against the overblown character types on display. But, despite their tendency to see everything through the lens of what could financially benefit them, they do develop and grow and you can find yourself broadly in sympathy with them come the end.
Zombie For Sale does not make any attempt to make any of this scary, either; it knows exactly what it is, even referencing the far more serious Train to Busan as the characters try to work out what to do once the shit hits the fan. It also references other zombie horrors, including a certain scene from a certain Braindead (Dead Alive) so it clearly has a sense of where it does, or doesn’t fit in with the genre and pays due deference to it. There are definitely shades of Fido here, too, as the Parks all try to make the most out of the semi-domesticated Jjong-bi – but when it transpires that a zombie bite isn’t simply a means to cheat the ageing process and the big pay-off comes along, this is a high-energy, escalating crisis to rival many of its peers, even if the sense of threat is mitigated by the comedic style. This is also a film about rural life, how whatever could befall a major city would at least generate some kind of response; here, it takes a whole lot of time for anyone to really notice what’s going on. All of this only adds to the good-natured appeal of the film overall.
A quirky, often ingenious film, Zombie For Sale keeps things pretty light whilst bringing a series of surprises to the screen – and the genre. It’s great entertainment throughout, if you allow its profound silliness to carry you along.
Zombie For Sale screened at FrightFest Glasgow on Saturday 7th March 2020.