Gangnam Zombie
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
“Gangnam Zombie” takes the idea of internet virality to a new level, as content creators in the Gangnam district of Seoul get stuck with zombies in the building they work out of. The film very much feels like it wants to be a “Shaun of the Dead” riff on the tropes of zombie cinema, and I’ll be honest- there’s parts of how it works towards that where this film has me hook, line and sinker. But Soo Sung Lee isn’t aiming for a full-on comedy in the genre, even if the tone sometimes suggests otherwise. I almost wish he would have, but when the film is at its silliest is when it works.
The opening credits of this film acknowledges the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that kind of shocked me, but also had me hoping for something more here. Would it be in bad taste, given the millions whom have died since 2019 from the virus, to use it as a jumping off point to make a zombie infection from the disease? Of course, but it also would have maybe added some meat on the bones of a very generic zombie film, as well. I still enjoyed this one, though.
Two years after the outbreak of COVID, and life is getting back to normal for most people in Seoul. That includes two people in a storage crate looking to loot it before one of them becomes patient zero in a zombie outbreak, and two young adults (Il-Joo Ji and Ji-Yeon Park) who work with a content creator in an up-scale office building. When the zombie enters the building, chaos ensues, and our main characters- one of whom (Ji’s character) is a former taekwondo star- must fight for their lives.
I know a lot of people didn’t like George A. Romero’s “Diary of the Dead,” but I did, and for a time in this film, I was hopeful this film would use the idea of viral content creation as a major plot device in this film. Sadly, hopes of that are dashed about halfway into the film, and we’re left with our main characters against zombies. I think Ji’s Hyeon-seok and Park’s Min-jeong are engaging, but they aren’t really asked to do a lot in this film, sadly. A lot of ideas with potential here, but in the end, it just becomes more of the same. But sometimes, that’s fine, and overall, I would say that’s the case here.
