‘Gangnam Zombie’ (review)

Well-Go USA

There’s a tendency for people who are passionate about international cinema, particularly when they first discover it, to breathlessly extol to anyone who will listen, the virtues of the movies they’re discovering, and how we in America are so far behind when in comparison.

While there are certainly some things our domestic cinema could happily import, inevitably as they mature, that cinema buff is going to realize that they’re only getting a small fraction of the world’s cinema–the cream of a very large crop.

Which begs the question: How did Gangnam Zombie get a release?

Director Lee Soo-sung is most famous in Korea for a series of high school martial arts films called Bullies, but he got some international recognition for his 2019 thriller RoadKill which ably matched wicked suspense with social commentary.

You can see much of the same conceptual approach at play in Gangnam Zombie, Gangnum itself is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Seoul so from a Western perspective the title is roughly equivalent to Greenwich Zombie or SoHo Zombie, and lord knows there’s a long and hallowed tradition of skewering the agents of wealth and power with the walking dead.

The problem is, this film doesn’t have anything really going for it.

The zombies aren’t visually interesting at all; just actors with a little red around the eyes and mouth. They’re filmed in flat light and for economy, and the same few recur in longer action sequences, an obvious sign this was filmed on the run. One of the very best Korean thrillers is a zombie apocalypse film, Train to Busan and the COVID paranoia this film attempts to exploit was already covered by 2021’s Taiwan shocker The Sadness. This film suffers terribly by comparison to either of those.

Matinee idol Ji Il-joo plays Heyon-suk, a former taekwondo champion from the boonies working for a content creation firm in Seoul. Heyon-suk is infatuated with another employee there, Min-Jung (played by Park Ji-yeon) while their ridiculous boss constantly “pranks” them for insipid video content. There’s an infection rolling about posh Gangnam that causes people to act strangely– breaking into butcher’s shops for raw meat etc, and anyone who has seen a zombie movie can fill out the rest of the scorecard from there.

This is Ji Il-joo’s first feature film according to Wikipedia, and this is Park Ji-yeon’s first in several years. Both give off the quality that the leads in Starship Troopers gave that they were selected because they could so easily demonstrate vapidity. I’m not normally too hard on acting in a language I cannot speak, because I understand that there are subtleties I cannot grasp that no subtitles can convey but these guys feel stiff and wooden to the point of being nearly unprofessional.

Bad central performances and clinical direction with a paint by numbers script, unfortunately Gangnam Zombie isn’t the right address for your Korean horror fix as Halloween approaches.

Not recommended.