It’s a trio of Asian horror flicks without the usual supernatural style, which is my fave. Let’s so how these other subgenres worked out for me.
PROJECT SILENCE (2023)
The Mist meets Cujo on a bridge? Project Silence is repetitive and lacks intensity and suspense, with CGI dogs so bad they just kill any sense of realism.
We meet a variety of characters that are all inevitably headed for that bridge. A heavy fog leads to a massive car pile-up that also blocks off any exit from the bridge.
Then a military truck that was carrying laboratory dogs is found busted open. Pretty soon, the dogs are attacking people left and right, and their runs and leaps look less realistic than a modern video game. It just totally took me out of the movie, and I became bored fast.
There’s a cool helicopter crash scene, a plan is eventually hatched to lure the dogs off the bridge, and the bridge does collapse, so there’s all that to look forward to.
Even the motivation of the leader of the dog pack is pretty good, and it has to do with her love for her puppies, but by that point I was so dissatisfied with the special effects that I felt no sympathy for her and blurted out, “How sad. They killed all her CGI puppies.”
ZOMBIE SCHOOL (2014)
This infection movie is not listed as a comedy on IMDb, but it totally feels like a comedy due to the dubbing, and it seems pretty intentional, so I’m not sure what the intended tone was. Either way, it works as a comedy, because both the hubby and I were laughing throughout.
It especially needs to be a comedy on account of there being no likable characters. A group of troubled kids is sent to a school on an isolated island, and the teachers are basically bad kids that grew up to become teachers of bad kids. We’re talking like major physical abuse scenes.
Speaking of abuse, be warned that when the backstory of how people are becoming zombies comes out, it involves a flashback scene that looks like real footage of pigs being buried alive in a pit. I’d suggest either fast-forwarding through it or just looking away while listening to the dialogue for the explanation.
Basically, as kids and teachers are fighting nonstop, the principal’s dog is attacked by an infected pig. The principal goes out to get revenge on the killer pig, gets bit, turns into a zombie, and then infects the rest of the school staff.
This rampant spread doesn’t happen until 45 minutes into the movie. But the last half hour or so brings on the hyper zombie action, with fast zombies, power tools, and a dose of gore as the kids fight back against the infected.
It’s all pretty typical, except for one thing—at the last minute, there seems to be the presentation of a way to calm the infected! There could have been a whole new angle to the usual infected plot line if they had made this revelation an integral part of the plot earlier on.
NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD (2020)
Pixelated penis! This is the second time in about a month that I’ve watched a horror movie on Prime in which a scene with penis is blurred out! In this case, it’s two scenes! Double the dick opportunity totally denied! What is going on? I have no idea in either case if this is the way these films presented the penis or if Prime is censoring content.
At least we get to see the rest of the bod…
We are immediately cock-blocked for the first time in the opener before we meet a newlywed straight couple. For a sci-fi comedy that ends up running a little too long, the plot pacing is ironically fast. Within the first twenty minutes, the wife becomes convinced her husband is cheating, she goes to a private detective, he uncovers the husband’s philandering ways, and he drops a conspiracy bomb—he thinks her husband is an alien.
That leaves her to contend with the explosive suggestion for the bulk of the movie. Not to mention the gang of secret alien men that knows she’s uncovering their alien plot and therefore must be destroyed!
With the help of her female friends and the detective, she plots to kill her alien husband, which turns into an absolute comedy of errors, complete with seemingly dead people coming back to life. However, this is not in any way a zombie film, despite the English translation of the title. I have no idea if it’s the correct translation.
Night of the Undead is indeed comedic, with plenty of humorous scenarios, and it turns into an across town chase as the alien men hunt down the women, but despite the thrilling pursuit, the film somehow feels slow. If there had been a way to just trim about 15 minutes off the 105-minute runtime, it would have been a total blast. As is, it’s only like two-thirds a blast, and there’s no actual alien reveal scene in the end other than some red eye action.
