By Ben Bussey
When the first images and trailer from this slice of made-in-Taiwan horror first emerged, my kneejerk reaction was, zombies, martial arts punch-ups, hot Asian women – what could go wrong? This, alas, is one of those “I had to ask” moments. Turns out Zombie Fight Club gets a lot wrong. In fact, there’s very, very little it gets right. While there are snippets of what might have been a perfectly decent B-movie – or, in fact, at least two perfectly decent B-movies – that which has been dished up at the end is an incoherent mess suitably only for background viewing under heavy intoxication.
For the first half of the film, the title seems a very odd choice indeed, as director Joe Chien’s movie – apparently a sequel to his Zombie 108, which I haven’t seen, but this doesn’t seem to matter given it’s an extremely familiar set-up – bears little to no resemblance to David Fincher’s 1999 broadsheet-botherer, beyond a rather squalid visual aesthetic (they seem to have chosen a muted piss green colour scheme, which is rather off-putting). Instead, the film spends much of the opening act as an unabashed rip-off of The Raid, boasting a SWAT team dressed identically to the one in Gareth Evans’ film breaking into a very similar-looking residential building under similarly false pretences (although it takes a lot less time for the subterfuge to come to light). Not content with this, though, Chien also introduces us to a bunch of residents in the building, including a thirtysomething couple, a middle-aged teacher whose teenage daughter has a few friends around to celebrate her birthday, and a bunch of gangster rapper types crashing on a buddy and his girlfriend to host a drug-fuelled orgy.
Okay – I realise rap is a thing in Asia, reflected by the fact that one of these characters is played by a real-life rapper, MC Hotdog. I also realise that English is spoken alongside other native languages in Asian territories. It doesn’t change the fact that witnessing Taiwanese guys trying to dress and talk as though they’re straight outta Compton is, to this viewer at least, like listening to a particularly pained and vocal alley cat try to play an out of tune violin with its hind paws whilst dragging its rear claws down a blackboard. Only I imagine that wouldn’t stop being funny quite so quickly.
Obviously the plan is to deliver on all the basics with an abundance of the three Bs. So it is that pretty much all the women on screen spend all their time either in their underwear, not wearing much more than their underwear, getting manhandled by some sweaty sleazy guy, or some combination thereof. In the meantime they all remain totally two dimensional and lifeless, and once the shit hits the fan most of them don’t do a great deal more than scream, run, and continue to get manhandled in their underwear. Whilst I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to anyone when I say I have no problem with seeing women in their underwear, there’s no mistaking a nasty, sadistic and misogynistic overtone to proceedings here, all of which only gets worse as the film ventures into its second half.
See, here’s the thing. Just as it seems the storyline has reached its breaking point, with all the threads within the apartment building having more or less met in the middle, the story all of a sudden just stops and skips forward to one year after the zombie apocalypse where the world seems to have turned into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, with one group of survivors having established a sadistic dictatorship forcing other survivors to battle zombies for their amusement; yes, at last the title makes sense. Shame no one cared to make it an any way, shape or form a natural progression of the existing narrative. As sloppy storytelling goes, this really does take the biscuit. It seems Chien and co couldn’t decide what they wanted to do more – remake The Raid as a zombie movie, or do a crude pit-fighting movie with zombies – and decided to just do both in the same movie, without bothering to make the story flow or even make much sense.
Of course, none of this would matter at all if Zombie Fight Club delivered on its basic promise, and was actually fun to watch. Once again, it’s got zombies, it’s got fighting, it’s got foxy ladies not wearing much; all those things should add up to a fun way to burn 90 minutes. But it doesn’t work at all. The zombies look terrible thanks to an overabundance of bad CGI, which naturally follows through into the gore FX; and while there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the fight choreography, it might help if we could actually see what was going on, as the whole film is so poorly lit and dingy-looking (and, as I mentioned, piss-toned) that we can’t even pass this off as simple eye candy. Worse yet, it’s for the most part utterly joyless, falling into the perilous trap of believing that being excessively mean-spirited translates as being hip and edgy. Sorry, but you have to provide a decent story, characters we can get invested in, and – if at all possible – give us something we haven’t seen before. As you’ve most likely ascertained by now, Zombie Fight Club fails miserably on all counts.
Frightfest attendees are advised to be elsewhere when Zombie Fight Club premieres on Discovery Screen 3, Friday 28th August. For the rest of us, Altitude release it to DVD on Monday the 31st.