Alive- A Zombie Movie Review

We begin with the protagonist Oh Jun-U, a bleach blond Korean mama’s boy, waking late, briefly fucking with a video game, and then boom! Straight to the zombie mayhem. Elapsed time- less than three minutes. These are also turbo zombies, fast, flailing, bitey bitey kill kill, purely disco. Doucheboy watches the horror outside from the vantage of his 5th floor balcony. Oh no! His dipshit neighbor pal shows up freaking out! He wants to take a DUMP? Wha… He goes into the bathroom, there’s screaming outside, the TV says cannibals are swarming outside like mofos and watch for bites, those wads are infectimundo. Bro bro comes out of the crapper, does the cracking tweaker bone yoga contortions made famous in KINGDOM, and charges in for the bite! Mama’s boy repels him and chases him into the hall! ANOTHER turbo zombie, this one fat, kills the new bro zombie! The irony!

Roll opening credits.

Initially, the Dream of Fire is slow to awaken in Oh Jun-U’s nads. Kill or be killed does not become a clear thing for him as soon as it would for some boys and girls. He learns quickly after a zombie trashes his place and his mom or the maid isn’t there to clean that shit up but it’s not quite enough. He cries a little at one point because he misses mommy and you kinda hope a gnarly rescue fighter swoops in and steals his shit right then, someone who might be trying to save people instead of hiding. Maybe one of the dudes from the Korean metal band Tokkaibe, fresh from slaughter and thirsty for beer and a piece of dumbass. Finally, Jun loses his shit and goes a little crazy. Bit by bit, baby step by boo boo wiggle, he’s getting there. But in the end only one thing will spur him to apocalypse greatness and we can see it coming a mile away. The human zest for the timeless combination of booze and pussy is what separates homo sapien males from the other primates and when, partially loaded, Jun boy catches a distant whiff of poon on the wind, the dormant Beyond Thunderdome psycho appropriate for the situation rises in his mental landscape, pushing aside his pitiful Zoomer inner child. There is truth here. The desire to get some is one of the great drivers of our species and we all know it. The almost-but-not-quite saucy Kim Yu-Bin is the only game in town but… we feel sorry for her medium fine ass right away. Jun is the only game in town for her too and she deserves just a little better, if only to make this more interesting. Not a Brad Pittcock Ken Doll but a sort of… mmm, maybe one of the dudes from the Korean death metal band Kalpa. A dude who can get down and do some man shit, like behead the undead but also run a bubble bath for her as a prelude to serious nasty. I’m just saying. This is a movie review. I’m not shooting for a Pulitzer.

Director Cho Il-Hyung does not rise to the top, or even the middle, with this predictable, not very creepy, not very original, slightly sappy K-Zom. The lead is a dip, the hot chick is so so, the bla bla bla. Unique to Korean zombie flicks is the screwball lead, it seems. Train To Busan was a far better movie in every way, but the lead there was a rich brobot douche we wanted to die from scene one. Alive’s protagonist is a dullard mamma’s boy and there are times when we wish he just fell off his balcony, the sparkless love interest vanished, and the cameras turned toward more interesting characters who were doing something. Anything else. On a scale of one to five skulls, zero skulls being Michelle Morgan’s suicide awful It Happened In L.A. (perhaps the worst movie in decades) and Bladerunner being a Five Skulls with Fire, I give this wimpy wag One Skull.