Samurai Zombie


Title: Samurai Zombie
Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Horror, Action, Comedy
Starring: Mitsuru Fukikoshi, Issei Ishida, Tak Sakaguchi
Director: Tak Sakaguchi
Language: Japanese

Samurai. Freakin'. Zombies. If you're anything like me you'll already have been sold and will be looking about for a copy to add to your collection making my work here done rather quickly, but for the sake of those incapable of understanding how this combination could never really fail and are still reading, I'll elaborate further. The Director who also stars in this creation is usually more likely to be found working on the choreography and starring in films such as Azumi and Versus, two films that also happened to be written by the same man responsible for the script here. With an old 80s style camera work – complete with cigarette burns in the top right corner – and a cast of unknowns, its clear a hefty amount of the rather small budget has gone into filming the raining blood, decapitation attacks, samurai showmanship and getting the zombie to drool just the right amount of unidentified zombie ooze.

If you're still under some sort of illusion that there's anything remotely sensible about this film then let me make this abundantly clear; the purpose of this film is to take things to heights of ridiculously over the top proportions; to have blood spurts reach higher than any film has fired them, more silly stunts and action than should be deemed possible, and it aims to do all this whilst still kicking things to the old way. By modern standards the level of gore may not hold a candle to many films explicitly showing vital organs and the like, but since when the lack of human anatomy in 'Braindead' make the lawnmower scene less fun? And that is precisely the intention behind this film, to have an all out action romp that lives up to the legacy set forth by the likes of Versus and Evil Dead. Except with Samurai.

This is not a difficult film to mock; the cast of unknowns picked more for their looks than acting abilities and the fact that the plot has all the intelligence of a Miss Teen USA competition, its only reason for existing at all to tie together one action sequence to the next and create a slightly bigger bang than what preceded it. There is also a slight blue-ish hue to much of the film which seems a little unusual, and I'm sure there are plenty who won't like the post-production work which I can only assume was intentionally 'sloppy' to re-create an old film projector reel, complete with occasional shaking and noise. There's nothing smart about a zombie samurai with anger management issues, taking out his frustrations on the conveniently close by vic-I mean characters. It may not be the greatest masterpiece of its kind but for such a low budget it doesn't half know how to make the most of it and deliver precisely what B-Movie horror fans want.

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