Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Studio: Heyshine International Co.

Director: Joe Chien

Review Rating: 6

A zombie outbreak in downtown Taipei causes a band of survivors to confront other and potentially greater evils!

Rumor has it, this is the very first ever Taiwanese zombie movie. If that’s the case, it is kind of sad. This particular film isn’t just a zombie movie, it seems to be a confused homage and knockoff of a few other big big Hollywood Horror films, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Writer and Director Joe Chien seems to have the great desire to strike out on his own, and yet have as many “big budget recognizable” film references as possible too. I see influences from oh so many zombie movies, and while that’s more or less fine, the rest of this stuff is superfluous and unnecessary to any kind of storyline. We have the walking/running dead already, what more do you need?!

So the opening title sequence gives us, oh the hell you say, things going wrong in a lab somewheres and there’s a zombie outbreak. This goes on for awhile in much the same fashion as any zombie movie, a gang of mismatched survivors get chased all over hell and gone by these awful dead things. There’s this woman towards the beginning who, mysteriously with a little girl she claims is hers, after being harried by zombies gets into a cab that turns out to be driven by a nutjob. This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, until we get about halfway through the movie, and the zombie action abruptly switches to TCM-land. There’s this disgusting degenerate I hesitate to even call him a man, who has girls he tortures and rapes in his basement, along with zombie power generators already. I do not kid. Suddenly the two things are related because the survivors have stumbled upon Disgusto’s lair and insist on using it as a hideaway from the zombies. Confrontations ensue soon thereafter and while there is a pretty good scene wherein Disgusto dies a rather horrific and well-deserved death, it still has zero to do with the overall arcing plot. Or so I thought, until I realized there wasn’t an overarcing plot, not really. And it is a sad thing to contemplate, for I like zombie movies and Asian Horror flicks; this one is a confused hodgepodge of both and neither.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfiX1Z2IxCI]