London Korean Film Festival 2019: The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale (South Korea 2019: Dir Lee Min-jae)

It’s been a good year for the zom com. The movie we didn't think we needed - the excellent Zombieland follow up Double Tap - was a huge success, and now here's Korean director Lee Min-jae's debut feature, a fun and seriously sarcastic take on both the zombie movie and the perils of commodification.

The Park family are scam artists. Owners of a run down garage, in the movie's first scene we get the measure of them: a passing motorist is duped out of a load of money, forced into having his car repaired at ridiculously high prices, only to find that the family were the cause of the original vehicle failure by laying caltrops across the road. The family comprise station owner Joon-Gul (Jeong Jae-yeong), his wife, the pregnant Nam-Joon (Uhm Ji-won), failed in business brother Min-Gul (Kim Nam-gil), reluctant daughter Hye-gul (Lee Soo-kyung) and Hawaii obsessed widowed dad Man-Deok (Park In-Hwan).

At the nearby pharma company in the town of Poognsan, human experiments have been carried out to test a trial drug, and have clearly gone wrong. One of the 'experiments,' a young guy turned zombie (Jung Ga-ram) escapes the facility and wanders into the life of the Park family. Of course they remain unaware that he is a zombie - and daughter Hye-gul even takes a bit of a shine to him despite his rather ravaged appearance - until he takes a bite out of Man-Deok, which is unusual behaviour as our zombie is seemingly vegetarian, preferring cabbages to brains.

The bite triggers something rather unexpected: Man-Deok wakes up a younger, more virile version of himself. The zombie’s bite seems to have rejuvenation powers: the bitten man wastes no time in clearing out the contents of the family safe and pissing off to his beloved Hawaii.

Seizing on the potential for a bit of money making, Ming-gul rents out the walking corpse - now domesticated, named 'Jong-bie' and housed in Man-Deok's vacated mobile home - to bite locals (for a price of course), persuading the vegetarian zombie to chow down on the arms of strangers only by applying ketchup to the limb first. Before long the money's flowing in, the garage has been re- purposed, and the town's menfolk are all sprightly again. But it becomes obvious that youth is simply the first phase of infection for the bitten, and it's only a matter of time before the Park family have some new situations to deal with, and not just the fact that Nam-Joon's waters have broken.

The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale is that rare thing, a horror comedy that is actually laugh out loud funny. Sure, in true Korean style some of the comedy is quite broad, but a lot of the fun is found in the interactions of the Park family, whether coping with the undead or each other. They’re a reprehensible bunch (they reminded me of a more comic version of the family in Koreeda's 2018 film Shoplifters), but as with all such cinematic families, the more time you spend with them the more you get to like them.

Lee Min-Jae is clearly aware of the movie's genre - a clip of the 2016 Korean flick Train to Busan is used for instructional purposes, although this movie is much lighter on gore.There's also nods to Cocoon (1985) in the rejuvenative power of the zombie's bite, and Warm Bodies (2013) in the budding rom zom story between the 'Jong bie' and Hye-gul. The Odd Family: Zombie on Sale may be a knockabout movie, but it has some serious things to say about the family, the role of kinship and the perils of the pursuit of money. Apparently the director (who also co-wrote the script) didn't start out with the intention to make a comedy. Well however it happened, I've very pleased that he did.

The Dead Don't Die (USA 2019: Dir Jim Jarmusch)

In the quiet town of Centerville, USA - 'A real nice place' reads the sign on entering - things move very sleepily. At the local police precinct, officer in charge Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) is laconic and, frankly, bored, facing but not wanting retirement. His two officers, fatalistic Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and nervous Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) don’t have a whole lot to do. Their only slight concern in the otherwise regular town is the strange presence of new funeral home mortician, zen mistress Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton),

But things are about to change. Firstly, it's taking ages to get dark. Watches and phones stop working. There’s talk on the radio about the earth being slightly tipped off its axis due to widespread fracking. Secondly, at the local diner two staff have been savagely murdered, their bodies ripped apart and eaten by what the police think might have been one, possibly several animals. Actually the real culprits are two locals (Iggy Pop and Jarmusch regular Sara Driver), newly risen from the dead - one assumes because of the whole earth axis thing - and desirous of both human flesh and coffee – hence hitting the diner.

Robertson, Peterson and Morrison investigate and become aware that the local cemetery is indeed giving up its dead to roam the streets and attack at will. These zombies, rather like the ones in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), hold on to some vestiges of their former life and are driven to revisit the places they knew when alive (the undead shambling outside a drugstore muttering ‘Xanax’ amuses, and there's a strangely tragic sequence with kids wandering around the detritus of a candy store looking lost and vulnerable).

The police of course have never seen anything like this. Morrison breaks down, Robertson just feels powerless, but Peterson acquires some inner strength: it is he who works out that the only way to kill the undead is through a ‘head shot’ and subsequently becomes rather proficient at this, much to the distaste of Morrison, who may have a certain attraction to the gawky police officer.

Sabre wielding oddball Zelda, briefly surprised when two of her dead charges wake up while on the morticians table, seems to have anticipated the return of the dead and takes on the mantle of chief zombie despatcher. And when a group of kids drive into town, described as 'hipsters' by the locals and surely cannon fodder for the zombies - in line with a million other undead films you’ve ever seen - the stage is set for a massive zombie slayathon.

I’ve probably made The Dead Don't Die sound more fun than it is. The first hour is well set up. There are the usual quirky characters found in Jim Jarmusch’s previous movies: Steve Buscemi plays the town bigot, complete with 'Make America White Again' baseball cap; Adam Driver as officer Peterson is suitably and typically awkward (his arrival on the scene in a Smart car, scrunched up inside in a vehicle clearly too small for him, may be the funniest shot in the film); Tom Waits as the almost feral woodlands dwelling Hermit Bob – who gets to narrate some of the film – looks very much like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz (1939); Rosie Perez as the ‘say what you see’ TV reporter Posie Juarez is good value; but the star of the piece is flaxen haired be-robed Swinton (her character name, like that of Perez, a kind of mangling of her real one). Zelda’s Scottish brogue contrasting with her glacial features, stilted, sudden movements and odd speech (seeing Peterson’s Star Wars key ring she comments “Ah. Excellent fiction” and describing herself as an "accumulator of local information") makes one suspect she might not be entirely human.

But sadly Jarmusch’s film, once set up, does not know where to go. The zombie attack scenes are initially well staged (the despatched undead break into a shower of black dust rather like the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but there's an increasing sense of purposelessness, and the realisation that Jarmusch's movie is maybe just him having fun with some friends (in contrast to his more substantial 2013 take on the vampire movie in Only Lovers Left Alive). There's nothing wrong in that of course, but the director's reheating of themes previously visited by others and liberally referencing those movies within the script (a car which looks like Johnny's vehicle in the first scene of Night of the Living Dead is described as "very George Romero") gradually turns The Dead Don't Die into an increasingly inert homage to some much better movies. I mean, Romero offered us the conclusion that the zombies in Dawn of the Dead are basically us in a different form, but he made that point over 40 years ago. There's some fourth wall breaking along the way which assures the audience that the whole thing is probably a meta directorial in joke, but by then we've wearied of the lack of pace, the plodding set pieces and, well, the point of the thing. Disappointing.

The Girl With All the Gifts (UK/USA 2016: Dir Colm McCarthy)

This is Colm McCarthy's second feature film as director. His first, Outcast, from 2010, weaved magic and dysfunctional relationships in an uneasy and decidedly low budget mix. The Girl With All the Gifts, an adaptation of M R Carey's bestselling 'possible future' novel of the same name (Carey also wrote the screenplay) is similarly downbeat, a kind of paean to 1970s UK dystopian sci fi television, but with some bigger themes (and bigger stars) on display.

The Girl With All the Gifts opens with a group of young children in a classroom setting, somewhere deep within a secure facility. Unusually the children are manacled. One of them, Melanie, shows a high degree of intelligence and a connection with their teacher, Helen Justineau (a nicely downplayed performance from Gemma Arterton). Sgt Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine, slightly going through the motions) is wary of treating the children as 'normal' - he exposes a bare arm which is enough to set off the childrens' collective bestial behaviour. For these children are infected by the same fungal disease that has turned most of the rest of the country into crazed zombies nicknamed 'hungries' - the children display much more control and sentience, although they're feared by the military staff (who wear protective gel to disguise their human smell) and fed on a diet of worms to remind us of their genus. When the hungries break through the compound's barrier and into the facility, Melanie, Parks and Justineau all manage to escape in a truck also containing Dr Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close, icy and not exactly redefining herself), a ruthless scientist who believes that the children bodily carry the infection's antidote via their brain tissue and spinal fluid, and therefore must be sacrificed to save the world. But Melanie has other ideas.

This is a zombie film which attempts something a little loftier than the usual. Don't get me wrong, it's still a B movie, albeit an expensively cast one - more than half of the film is devoted to the characters wandering the overgrown abandoned shopping arcades of our once great cities, for example - but in concentrating the story on the androgynous Melanie (a stellar performance from newcomer Sennia Nanua) rather than the zombie hordes it offers some more interesting observations about the relationship between infected and uninfected.

I liked the way in which the film slowly explained the relationship between the different factions rather than rushing to cram the exposition into the film's first fifteen minutes, and how it referenced the changing shape of the virus: as a fungus, it begins to sprout from the dead into huge, spreading growths containing seed pods that if broken will make the disease airborne. The generational aspect of the zombies is also interesting and probably the most frightening idea in the film - that the initially infected are the foot soldiers for something much more calculated. The film has a lot to say about what it means to be human and the division between human and beast, with a depth rare for such a genre movie.

It also offers up an ending (which of course DEoL cannot divulge) both apocalyptic and redemptive, a fiery climax in striking counterpoint to the washed out colour palette of the rest of the film, which concludes with a scene that is arguably more cinematic than plausible - but hey, this is a zombie film. Mention should also go to the immersive soundtrack of the Chilean composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, which underscores the increasing tension perfectly. Not a masterpiece, but along with the recent Train to Busan, doing something very different with a genre that needed to diversify.

Train to Busan (South Korea 2016: Dir Yeon Sang-ho)

Zombie movies have been around for decades. The genre shows no signs of fading (in fact quite the opposite), so these days to keep things fresh filmmakers often approach such films with a view to exploiting their cross genre potential: so we’ve had the zombie romance movie, the zombie comedy, the zombie war film, the zombie animals attack movie…and now, courtesy of South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho, we have the zombie disaster movie.

Seok Woo is a misanthropic financial investor with a failed marriage and a daughter, Soo-an, who spends time split between separated parents. You can tell that Seok Woo’s a bit of a meanie – he buys his daughter a present for her birthday that he’d already bought her earlier that year, and his ex-wife is listed on his phone as just that – ‘ex wife.’ He also categorises most of his business contacts on the same phone as ‘lemmings.’

Currently staying with dad but missing mum, Soo-an’s birthday wish is to take the train and visit her mother in Busan, and Seok Woo grudgingly agrees to alter his business schedule to accompany his daughter on the journey. But as the train pulls away from Seoul station, the city’s placed under lockdown following a viral outbreak throughout the country – unfortunately one of the last people to board is an early victim of the infection.

The rest of Train to Busan is a series of incredibly tense set pieces as the numbers of infected on the train rise exponentially, and the uninfected survivors attempt to stay alive until the train reaches Busan.

Director Sang-ho’s background is in animation, which is to the film's advantage as he stages the action really well, filling the screen with incident, and his wide shots of city devastation look stunning. The rise of the infected, pouring between train carriages and smashing through sheets of broken glass like swarms of insects, is both terrifying and relentless. And the infection spreads in seconds, providing that the zombie gets a decent bite in (of course key characters who become infected are only partly chomped, therefore taking much longer to turn, and fulfilling one of the great disaster movie staples, the long death scene). The action is enhanced no end by the zombies being of the very fast and incredibly athletic variety (is there any other type these days?), although they're not so bright, having a problem with door handles and darkness.

And talking of disaster movies, this film is full of steals from that genre. Stick thin characterisation at the beginning of the movie to establish the key players; evil ‘must-survive-at-any-cost’ businessman who’ll step on anyone to stay alive; final reel with major character change triggered by emotional epiphany; they’re all here. I did slightly take exception to little Kim Su-an ( who very convincingly plays Soo-an), not because she isn’t a terrific actress, but more that she spends the last twenty minutes of the film screaming and crying, which to me felt more than a little exploitative and rather unnecessary for a very young girl to be put through.

Critics have praised  this film for its combination of horror and heart tugging moments - personally I felt these elements, combined with the broad humour (also to be found in films like Joon Ho Bong's 2006 movie The Host) didn't quite gel. But really Train to Busan is all about the action. At two hours long it rarely flags, and Sang-ho escapes the limitations of a film set on one train by breaking up the set pieces, allowing the audience to recover themselves before the next slice of undead action. It’s nail biting stuff and, despite my slight concerns, really does breathe new life into the genre.