Man I just can't get enough of those Asian Zombie flicks!!!
So this time here is another one.
This weeks MOVIE OF THE WEEK is:
VERSUS
This one may not be quite cool as WILD ZERO, but it comes a close, a very close, second. In fact, perhaps if it included Guitar Wolf, it might have even topped Wild Zero. Unlike WILD ZERO though, this movie is much more serious in it's mood and atmosphere.
Instead of Rock 'n' Roll, this one has some really cool kung-fu and extreme violence. It reminded me a lot of SHOGUN ASSASSIN with the blood sprays and severed bodies and the comic book style to it. It's cool when a swordsman can swathe through a crowd of people (or in this case zombies) hacking and slashing, then stop, leaving the group standing frozen for that one second before all simultaneously falling to the ground. And torrential arterial sprays are full on! Plus there is mucho gun-play also done very cool-like with lots of posing and two-handed shooting and the choice of guns was making me drool...check out the muzzle-break on that .50 cal Barrett M-82 in the pic below...
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And all through this, cool camera tricks and angles and slow motion and all the cool stuff that makes the action stand out.
But does it have a plot, you may well ask?
Well try this one on for size. It seems there are 666 portals that connect this world to the other side. These are concealed from all human beings. Somewhere in Japan exists the 444th portal.... The forest of resurrection. Or so the blurb at the begining tells us. We then see this samuri dude cut up a bunch of zombies before being cut in half by this other evil looking Samuri dude.
We cut ahead to the present day when a couple of escaped convicts are meeting a group of gangsters in this same forest. The gangsters have kidnapped a girl and brought her along and when they meet up with the convicts, they inform them they must all wait for the boss. The convicts don't want to wait around, naturally enough since they are wanted men. An arguement errupts and one of the gangsters is killed. A standoff between the convicts and gangsters is short-lived as the dead gangster comes back to life and attacks.
One convict is killed and the other, the apparent hero of the story, grabs the girl and escapes. The gangsters go after them but it dawns on them that they have burried a lot of bodies around these woods in the course of their gangstering careers. Soon there are Zombies galour.
From here on the storyline gets quite convoluted. But fear not, for the action makes up for it. Seems our hero convict is the re-incarnation of the samuri that was cut in half at the begining (but he doesn't remember it) and the Big Boss of the gangsters was the guy that cut him in half and the girl figures in it somehow and they do this battle every few hundred years for some reason that I can only guess at. I keep meaning to pay more attention and figure it out each time I watch this, but I always get caught up in the action!
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As cool as it is, this is a pretty hard flick to find. Your best bet would be to check EBAY and pick up one of the bootleg VCD or DVDrs that are pretty much always availible.
Or you could trade me a VCD for it (I don't mind trading VCDs cause it only takes me a couple minutes to make one). But worry not, a flick this cool though is bound to be released in North America sooner or later.....
.....and sure enough it is. But the version I rented was cut to snot... but rest assured, Amazon now has you covered, you can get a both a directors cut and a special edition:
