The last few years have made most people Monday Morning Zombie Killers. Most zombies are rather easy targets as long as you can stay just outside their grasp and teeth. Things get messy when you stumble over one or get surrounded by the horde. They’re rather brain dead otherwise. Fighting them, you just have to go for the head. Nothing else matters. Zombie Fight Club is a Chinese film that is all about battling the undead on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Thirty minutes before the virus takes hold, we’re taken inside a rather busy apartment building in Taipei, Taiwan. A party gets going and the chief refreshment is a shipment of bath salts from Los Angeles. The party goes into overdrive when the local rapper arrives and is ready to have an orgy. A more innocent party is taking place on the different floor with a few grown up school girls saying goodbye to a friend. Downstairs finds a SWAT team arriving to bust a cartel’s drug hideout. Just an ordinary day in that part of town. Except it isn’t quite so quiet. During the orgy, a few of the girls get extra freaky and into biting the rapper. He’s down for a little roughness until he’s turned into dinner. The drug raid turns into a blood bath of bullets. But then the victims prove they aren’t done with the cops. The whole building goes to hell pretty quick. The action is so fast that there’s no time for anyone to call the building’s supervisor to complain about the zombie infestation. These aren’t normal zombies because a few mutate to include a giant mouth stomach. Will anyone escape this apartment building?
The film jumps forward a year to how the neighborhood has adjusted to life in the undead zombie apocalypse. It’s a Mad Max world where local bigwigs bet water against women on the Zombie Fight Club games. This part of the film takes a couple pages out of The Walking Dead. Although this doesn’t completely resemble the zombie fights put on by the Governor. The evil leader has his zombie daughter caged up in his office like the Governor though. The new guy is a bit more evil including an uncomfortable scene where he “feeds” one of his female fighters while the zombie daughter watches. Many of the same faces from the first part are still trying to escape their fate.
Zombie Fight Club is light on character development. It’s like a video game in the sense that it creates just enough of a personality before flinging that character into battle with the undead or turning them a zombie to attack their fellow characters. The two dimensional qualities doesn’t ruin the experience since nobody watches Zombie Fight Club expecting My Dinner with Andre. This movie satisfies with a vintage mix of exploitation carnality and violence. During the second act, the warlord knows how to dress his all female security staff so this isn’t all people in dirty and bloody ragged clothes. There’s so much blood on the screen that none of the tenants will be getting their security deposits back. Zombie Fight Club is a movie that lives up to its name. Just slightly derivative and yet a slugging thrill ride in the zombie apocalypse.
The video is 2.35:1 anamorphic. They do a lot of green processing of the dimly lit shots to make this a marvelous messy world. The audio is 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio. There’s also a 2.0 DTS-HD mix. Both bring out the excitement of all the action. Viewers can also listen to everything in the original Mandarin in both 5.1 and 2.0 DTS HD mixes. If you listen to the Mandarin, you can watch the film with English subtitles.
Zombie Fight Club Stunts (2:42) shows how much prep went into this non-stop battle pic. They mix up guns, swords, feet, fists and zombie jaws on the screen.
Theatrical Trailer (2:05) sets the film up just right.
Zombie Fight Club is an exciting video game of a film.
Scream Factory presents Zombie Fight Club. Directed by: Joe Chien. Screenplay by: Joe Chien. Starring: Andy On, Jessica Cambensy, Michael Wong, Terence Yin and Jack Kao. Rated: Not Rated. Running Time: 95 minutes. Released: February 2, 2016.
