* The best case of WTF-positive that we have seen recently would be the Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958, with Allison Hayes) reference/homage that appears completely out of the blue in Love Lies Bleeding (2024 / trailer).
Trailer to
Gangnam Zombie:
Who knows what the actual budget of Gangnam Zombie was, but the movie looks and feels spectacularly tightly budgeted: most of the activity takes place in one location, and the core cast is extremely limited (though amply capable of convincingly conveying their given character). Melding martial arts with infectious zombies, the plot of Ganganam Zombie follows former taekwondo champion Hyeon-seok (Il-Joo Ji of Blades of Blood [2010 / trailer] and the feel-good but sexistly titled My Bossy Girlfriend [2019 / trailer]), who gets trapped at work when a zombie outbreak hits the building. If that weren't problematic enough, he has a major crush on his female co-worker Min-jeong (Korean pop star Park Ji-yeon* of Death Bell 2: Bloody Camp / Gosa 2 [2010 / trailer] and Wannabe / Hwanyeo (2024 / trailer]), and soon they are the last of the living in the building.
* A former member of the internationally successful K-pop group T-ara, she segued into a solo career in 2014 with the release of the album Never Ever...
Title track to Ji-yeon's
Never Ever:
As in the far-superior zombie classic 28 Day Later (2002 / trailer), the zombie outbreak is the result of a virus — possibly corona — that gets transferred early in the film from an infected cat to a small-time thief, Wang-i (Kyoung-Hoon Jo of North Korean Guys / Donghaemulgwa baekdusan [2003 / full movie]) who breaks into a storage container to steal jewellery. How the cat could get into or survive in the container is perhaps an immaterial question, as the zombies are later revealed to be virtually indestructible — thus one can assume the cat was, too. We never see whether the first person Wang-i bites and kills turns, but later, once Wang-i reaches the city of Seoul — the Gangnam District, to be exact, which at the latest became internationally known after the mega-success of Psy's Gangnam Style — and enters the building where our two heroes do their daily, low-level, start-up company drudgery, those bitten turn quickly. And thus the people fall as rapidly as American constitutional rights under Emperor Trump....
Original Korean version of
Gangnam Zombie opens with Min-jeong and Hyeon-seok already fighting their way through the zombie-infested halls of the business building, an interlude that seems to end tragically — but don't fear, there's a WTF-negative follow-up later, after the movie goes back in time and commences chronologically. We are unconvinced that the opening scene really does anything more than simply pad the movie's running time, and in that sense it is not the only scene of the movie that conveys that same feeling of "filmed to pad".
The best actor of Gangnam Zombie, oddly enough, is the battle-axe landlady Soon-ja (Jung Yi-joo), a dislikeable figure but oddly convincing and believable and funny — she is directly involved in the WTF-negative "real ending", which like the WTF-negative opening scene, reveals a scriptwriter and director incapable of logical realism and, in turn, of killing their main characters. (Creative rule #1: Kill your darlings.) Main zombie Wang-i (Kyoung-Hoon Jo) is also effective — hell's bells, all the zombies are effective and believable, at least until the one (Yoon Joon-Ho) starts doing some break-dancing moves — but the obsessiveness with which the zombified Wang-i literally hunts and pursues Min-jeong and Hyeon-seok doesn't really correspond to the brain-dead-but-hungry zombie mold of the remaining undead.
Gangnam Zombie is never really scary, but it does get some laughs and a few scenes do have a certain tension, especially those in which some dumb-fuck human acts as if the zombies are just agitated citizens (specifically, an early street scene and a later scene of a guard entering a room of rampaging zombies to get them to calm down). For a horror film involving zombies, a fictional form of monster adversary, Gangnam Zombie keeps it numerous taekwondo fight scenes surprisingly grounded in reality, never going for any of the flights of fighting fantasy once common to so many Asian movies. Unluckily, this proves to a disadvantage for the movie, which could have used a few WTF-positive moments of the kind found in, dunno, flying martial arts movies like Black Mask (1996 / trailer) and/or House of Daggers (2004 / trailer) — neither of which, of course, are Korean films or feature taekwondo.
In general, Gangnam Zombie is a generic and relatively uninteresting zombie movie. It won't put you to sleep, but it is doubtful that you'll remember much of what you a day later. Definitely not imperative viewing.
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