Zombie Fight Club (2014) – A Movie A Day 2021 #5
Zombie Fight Club (2014) – A Movie A Day 2021 #5
I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. At least, in theory I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. I love the idea of zombies, and I love the versatility of the sub-genre. Yeah, that’s right, I used the word “versatility” when describing zombie movies. Even if a multitude of zombie movies use essentially the same plot over and over, the potential for variety is definitely there. Some of my absolute favorite movies and television shows of all time include zombies as a main focus, and they range from trashy splatter movies, to hilarious comedies, to historical action/dramas and beyond. The potential metaphors that zombies can be used for are numerous, and in the hands of a skilled set of filmmakers, a zombie movie can have great impact and meaning. But of course, with so many zombie movies having been made over the decades, many of them aren’t going to be so great. Zombie Fight Club falls firmly in the “not so great” category for me.
Zombie Fight Club is a Taiwanese zombie/action movie with lots of blood and guts. All of that sounds good so far, right? Of course it does. On top of that, the movie is filled with beautiful women and men in in skimpy outfits fighting hordes of the undead. So we have all the makings of a nice and trashy zombie movie that emphasizes fun over quality, and on that level I did enjoy Zombie Fight Club. The bloody action was fun, and the practical effects, when they were used, were over the top in a great way. A lot of the bullets and gore were digitally added though, and that was a whole lot less fun for me. I’m just not a big fan of purely digital effects when they look as overly fake as they do here. But then, I love practical effects even when they look fake, so that’s a contradiction I’ve had to learn to live with. Overall though, the action and blood (and skimpy outfits) are easily the best things about the movie, and they make it worth watching for some light entertainment.
My main issues with Zombie Fight Club start right in the title though. You’d think the movie would be about a club of some sort where people fight zombies. Or maybe the zombies fight each other. But what you get for the first hour of the movie is what feels like a riff on the scene in the apartment building towards the beginning of the original Dawn of the Dead. So after a while, I gave up on the “fight club” promise of the title and just settled for “zombie fight” instead.
In this first section, we meet a few different groups of people living in the same apartment building. We’re introduced to a guy and his girlfriend who get some drugs and have a party, what appear to be gang members who have kidnapped someone, and a group of police officers who are coming in to raid the place. People start turning into zombies after taking drugs (even though this doesn’t make a lot of sense given some various factors that I don’t really want to go into), and the building is quickly overrun. Meanwhile, it turns out all but one of the cops are dirty and are just trying to rob and kill the criminals they were sent to take down. The one good cop, Andy, separates from the rest of the officers when everything starts to fall apart, and Andy ends up pairing with the girlfriend of the guy who got the drugs at the beginning of the movie. So for the first hour of the movie, we follow Andy and the girlfriend, Jenny, as they try to survive and escape. We see some of the other people in the various apartments fight and die, but Andy and Jenny are the loose focus of the movie.
Then, over two-thirds of the way through the movie, we jump forward in time. We thought Jenny and Andy might have escaped, but in the new post-apocalyptic world, they are both slaves in a new society. The new society is run by a psycho ex-professor who we briefly saw murder his daughter’s friends after his daughter was killed. It’s super random, and this late in the movie, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a whole new beginning to the story. I mean, there are less than 30 minutes left in the movie when the time jump happens. But hey, we finally get to see the Zombie Fight Club!
The fight club is a pit where the slaves of this new world are forced to fight for their lives against the undead. So, not so much a fight club, and more of a murder-for-entertainment situation. Think of The Governor from The Walking Dead and the zombie fights he put on. It’s similar to that, but with slaves instead of (mostly) volunteers. And really, the whole new world situation is a lot like The Governor’s city in The Walking Dead, just way over the top. And yeah, I’ve been referencing other things while describing Zombie Fight Club, but it really does seem like the movie isn’t trying to hide its inspirations. Many scenes felt like the filmmakers saw something in something else that was cool, so they decided they wanted it in their movie even if the plot got completely twisted out of shape to make the scene happen.
So anyway, in the final 30 minutes of the movie we follow Andy and Jenny as they try to escape to freedom which has been overrun with zombies anyway. The end.
This really felt like two movies mashed together, and it would have been better had this been two separate movies. But as it is, I still enjoyed Zombie Fight Club for how goofy it is. It doesn’t take itself seriously, so I shouldn’t take it seriously either. I’m sure I’ll watch it again sometime, because now that I know what to expect, I can enjoy it for what it is: dumb, fun, and bloody.