KINGDOM on Netflix – a review

South Korea is quickly becoming a serious player in world zombie action. Kingdom, now on Netflix, is a great example. Based on the webcomic by Kim Eun-hee (he also wrote all six episodes), it’s the story of a feckless sissy prince, a gruesomely fucked up king, a smoking hot bimbo queen with dead eyes and a foot for a heart and- a whopping shitload of fast, crazy hideous formerly poor people turned zombie. Finger sniffing wussy crown prince Lee Chang sets out to investigate a mysterious sickness sweeping his land of beat to shit workers and discovers that a kindly nun turned cannibal to feed the starving masses and snap- disaster happened. Shit is deeply nasty in the kingdom. Will the crown prince set aside his cornholed nature, forget his courtly finishing school adult babyman shit, pick up a sword and join the common people? As with the magnificent Train To Busan, we want the hero to bite it mouth-to-curb style if he can’t set down his elite status halo and at least pretend he’s a real person. No more spoilers.

Kingdom has incredible set after incredible set. Its beautiful. Like Rampant, another visually pleasing but less developed K-Zom, there’s good swordplay and splendid period costumes. The zombies are, frankly, visually more impressive than the Walking Dead zombies. They drip. The glisten. They make freakish chattering noises and harrowing mews. And like in Train To Busan, these are turbo zombies. They move fast. They swarm. And the hats. The people of Joseon Dynasty may well have had the most incredible hats in human history. I am seriously not kidding.

I saw season one of Kingdom last year in Tokyo, and when I did I was impressed by the social subtext. The Walking Dead is, in so many ways, about how dangerous people are. Negan was just a dirtbag until the ZA and then he got to become his old real world tyrant boss. Train To Busan and especially Kingdom are different. More poignant. They highlight the shocking divide between the classes and how when the shit hits the fan, that shit is wet and fresh and full of corn and kim chi and it hits everyone in the mouth. And now, at last, it’s here in the States on Netflix. Just in time for the exhausting run up to the elections. The gods of television just might be democratic socialists.

And the hats. I can’t mention that enough.