Prosthetic Conscience

Junk

Okay, this is a capsule review (meaning, I’m too lazy to sit down and actually think about what I’m going to write about and make logical, coherent arguments) of the Japanese zombie movie Junk: Shiryô-gari. Spoilers are included (what kind of review doesn’t have spoilers?), so be forewarned, if you care.

Junk is what’s been called a Japanese “blender” movie. One genre isn’t enough, so they throw a couple into the blender. In this case, it’s a heist/mob doublecross film with zombies. Some first-time jewel thieves set up a meeting to sell their booty (oh, watch the search-engine hits roll in!) to the Yakuza. The meeting is at an abandoned (American) military base, which unfortunately, the military is actually still using for an “off-the-books” project on returning the dead to life. Zombie mayhem ensues, involving the jewel thieves, the Yakuza, a couple of military scientists, a horde of slow, mindless flesh-eaters, and one fast, smart zombie (the experimental subject who started the outbreak, and who incidentally is the late wife of the scientist who started the project).

Now, I should explain why I like zombie movies. I like zombie movies because they, ideally, depict the complete breakdown of society in the face of a danger that is ongoing (unlike post-plague or post-nuclear-apocalypse scenarios), relatively personal (zombies eating you are much easier to have a feel for compared to anonymous nuclear strikes or the earth being eaten from the inside-out by a black hole), and symbolically rich (mindless consumers, loss of individuality, man’s inhumanity to man). The fact that the zombies are less of a threat to the careful protagonist than are other humans is a bonus that will be found in the better class of flesh-eating-zombie films. Therefore, for me, the perfect zombie movie will involve a global catastrophe, a few people struggling for survival, hordes of slow, shambolic zombies, unnecessary and stupid betrayal, and lots of people having their flesh eaten.

So, how does Junk measure up? Well, I can’t say it’s in the top tier of zombie films like Romero’s trilogy (soon to be tetralogy) or 28 Days Later. It’s not a film that absolutely had to be made. But it’s not actually a bad film, like many other horror films on its budgetary level are. The plot is cobbled together from clichés, but it holds together well enough to do the job. Many reviewers have commented on how bad the acting is, especially from the Americans playing American military personnel; I think the problem is actually that their dialog was translated directly from Japanese, and that they were instructed to deliver it in the way that they did so that they would be intelligible to a Japanese audience with some knowledge of English. Or maybe it’s just a stylistic convention — many of their lines sounded like English-dubbed anime. The gore effects were also rather stylized, and in some cases a bit excessive (the gushing blood from where jewel thief Akira was stabbed in the foot with a pair of office scissors during the robbery, for example). The zombie makeup is mostly quite good, though the wounds, tearing flesh, and entrails are very early-’80s Savini. With these complaints, what’s good about it? Well, despite the low budget, it actually manages to be rather stylish, feeling like a live-action anime production. The characters mostly behave in fairly sensible ways. Somehow, it just fails to scream “I’m a bad, bad movie.” If you’re a fan of zombie movies, it’s definitely worth watching on the level of entertainment, but it’s not really a significant addition to the genre.

Overall rating: 5/10 — I went into it with dramatically low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised.

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