Zombies just don’t give a toss. Throw the shambling undead any genre you like and chances are the infected sons of bitches will run with it no matter how odd it may seem. So malleable are horrordom’s most enduring creatures, they be managed to pull off everything from social satire, to love story with varying levels of success, but with Netflix’s Ziam, the gut crunching living dead are trying on something more energetic on for size as the sub-genre closes its rotten choppers over the jugular of the action movie.
Of course, merging zombie flicks with some slam, bam action beats hardly sounds world changing (both Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead Remake and the Resident Evil films tread heavily in both worlds), but where Ziam attempts to be different is that it’s more of a martial arts zombie action movie that leans more on fists and feet rather than the stopping power of a trusty handgun. Can this oddity from Thailand really convince us that the best way to stop a zombie is to punch it in the mouth?
Once again, it’s dystopian future time and aside from some typically harsh colour grading, the world’s main problem is that it’s suffering from massive food shortages due to melting iice caps leading to disasterous climate change. However, in a future where crumbling icebergs are releasing bacteria that are millions of years old, Thailand has managed to keep it’s head above water due to out of the box thinking such as insect breeding (yum). However, that hasn’t stopped the country from becoming a decrepit, shithole that’s run by a predictably corrupt police state.
In this environment we find Singh, a one-time Muay Thai fighter of some talent, who wishes to abandon his job of being the muscle when delivering food items to the agricultural companny known as the VS Corporation, and leave the city with his doctor girlfriend, Rin. However, after delivering containers carrying fish found in a sunken freighter to the senior officials at VS, issues start to arise when they turn out to be infected by a lethal pathogen and causes someone who eats it to suffer violent seizures. Of course, no prizes for guessing exactly where the sick man is sent (if you said Rin’s hospital, you’ve won yourself a kewpie doll), and soon the familiar choking, contorting and bile drooling ocurrs that leads to a classic case of fast-zombie-itus.
Hearing over the news that his girlfriend’s hospital has become overrun by flesh eating infected, Singh makes a beeline for the place and muscles his way in despite the fact that police are shooting anyone who attempts to leave and before you know it, he’s brusing his knuckles on the jaws of snarling zombies in an attempt to save the love of his life.
However, despite having his hands full, matters are further complicated by having to protect an abandoned child named Buddy, and avoid the whims of the head of VS himself, who demands that he and his comatose wife be given preferential treatment when it comes to the evacuation with the building to be leveled after he’s gone.
Visiting hours just got busy.
With the prospect of witnessing the power of Muay Thai shatter the faces of the living dead, you may be forgiven for hoping that Ziam tries to be some sort of throwback to the Tony Jaa era of martial arts movies that’s sees a similarly talented bone breaker crack some skulls open with only the hammer blows from his elbows (Zom-Bak anyone?). However, as fucking awesome as that legitimately sounds, the film regrettably falls way short of that lofty target as the movie strangely chooses not to lead with its fists and instead goes a more conventional route. While the set up may seem in line with one of Paul W.S. Anderson’s more dystopian Resident Evil sequels (Ecological collapse! Desolate wastelands! Orange filters!), director Kulp Kaljareuk seems determined to keep reminding you of other bigger and better movies throughout the duration. The setting of a hospital as it’s battleground naturally evokes thoughts of John Woo’s Hard Boiled while the martial arts siege element recalls Garath Evans’ The Raid at multiple intervals and we can’t very well ignore a similar have/have not scenario that played out during George Romero’s Land Of The Dead.
However, while it gives matters the old college try and certainly has energy to spare, Ziam unavoidably feels a little bland, especially considering that Yeon Sang-ho’s superlative Train To Busan already set the bar unfeasibly high.
It also doesn’t help that Prin Suparat’s Singhn isn’t a particularly interesting lead as he lacks both the indestructible qualities of Jaa and the ass-kicking everyman feel of Iko Uwais and Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich’s Rin can’t seem to rise about her imperiled girlfriend role. Still, the foreboding that comes with Wanvayla Boonnithipaisit’s child companion proves to be unfounded as he proves to be actually quite useful (kind of) and while the martial arts sequences are actually lacking the impact that you’d hope, it makes up for it with some noticably gnarly zombies.
By now we’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to the various flavours of the undead. Fast, slow, smart, dumb, super strong, hung like a horse (thanks for that, 28 Years Later) and every variant inbetween has been all but exhausted thanks to fifteen years of The Walking Dead; but in a rare moment of genuine inspiration, Ziam manages to give us something fairly original, even if it means that things start to get a little silly. Prepare to witness fish zombies – a brand of infected that inexplicably carries a piscine gene that goes Super Saiyan once the zombies come into contact with water. While they prove to be a handful in their usual state, once they “fish out”, they suddenly transform into needle-toothed, Lovecraftian hybrids that prove to be even more frenzied than before. Yes, my brain was repurposing and paraphrasing Leslie Nielsen’s dialogue from Airplane! the moment they show up (“The life of everyone in Thailand depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fight these zombies, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.”), but at least the movie gives the film a legitimate mean streak and doesn’t hold back of the ramifications of zombies entering a postnatal ward with suitably nasty results.
However, while a sense of the far fetched should go hand in hand with the concept of a single dude using Muay Thai against fish zombies, Ziam plays the plot armour card way too many times to the point where it borderlines on cartoonish and soon gets surprisingly irritating. Maybe I’m just being too picky, but is it particularly wise to punch a highly infectious zombie in the teeth? Maybe if the fight scenes brought something legitimately innovative to the party, I’d feel more charitable to the hero casually surviving explosions at point blank range, but if your bullshit detector can survive the final, audacious, mid-credit twist, you might want to whack on another star for your efforts. Sporadically fun, yes; but these zombie stink of more than just fish…
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