Writer(s): Muroga
Starring: Nobuyuki Asano, Shû Ehara, Tate Gouta, and Anthony Grow
Back before the popularity of the internet exploded, the
easiest way for me to see horror movies I wanted to see was simply to buy
them. This, unfortunately, led to me
owning quite a few turds, as I had no idea if I would even like them before I
purchased them. Now, these were simpler
times—I lived with my parents, had a full-time job, and no debts whatsoever—so
the financial hit wasn’t a big deal back then, but thank goodness technology
has evolved since those days.
One such purchase was “Junk”, a low-budget Japanese zombie
flick I bought at the height of my zombie craze (which predated Hollywood’s, and just
about everyone else’s, by at least six years).
After getting my fill of gore from zombie epics like Lucio Fulci’s
“Zombie”, and Peter Jackson’s “Dead/Alive”, I was always looking for more
extreme movies to sate my massive appetite for zombie horror, and seeing as how
the Japanese have a penchant for extreme cinema, I was hoping “Junk” would
deliver.
We begin with a theft inside a jewelry store, complete with
many unnecessary shots of the characters walking in slow motion. Once the thieves get their fill of jewels,
and make their getaway, they place a call to a yakuza contact, who sets up a
meeting in an old, abandoned military base.
Well that military base was the location of experiments involving
reincarnating the dead (surprise!), and it doesn’t take long for the building
to be crawling with zombies.
Here you would think the yakuza and petty thieves join
forces in an attempt to get out alive.
But that’s where you would be wrong: The yakuza’s still want the jewels
all to themselves, for free, and so rather than avoiding the zombies, they
simply spend their time chasing down and trying to kill the thieves, something
that nets them only mixed results. At
the same time, the military, who by now has learned of the zombie infestation
in the warehouse, set up their own small SWAT team to try to handle it.
It almost sounds like enough happens for two separate
movies, but instead, all this is crammed into a rather scant 82 minutes. Well, you certainly can’t fault
writer/director Atsushi Moroga for a lack of ambition!
As for whether or not “Junk” “delivers”, I’ll give you an
ambiguous statement: It does, and it
doesn’t. I actually abhorred this movie
upon my first viewing over a decade ago, to the point that it has just sat in
my collection collecting dust ever since.
Watching it again, long after my zombie fascination has died down
(anytime Hollywood latches onto something, it tends to beat it until it’s a
dead horse), I can appreciate it for what it is: A very low-budget love letter
to not just zombie flicks, but horror, and even action films, in general.
That’s not to say that everything works, or even that it’s
necessarily a good film; even underneath all the homage lies a rather clichéd,
fairly predictable story, the special effects range from good, to appalling,
the acting is terrible, the bad guys fire thousands of shots and miss almost
every single time, and a couple of the characters are incredibly annoying (one
of whom happens to be a main character).
There’s also a Japanese man who speaks in such broken English that there
should have been English subtitles during his speaking parts; much of his
dialogue is unintelligible.
But “Junk” does have a certain streak of feminism that’s
still missing from a lot of movies even today; while the cast is predominantly
male, it’s the two females that are the strongest characters. One is Saki, played by Kaori Shimamura. As the getaway driver for the jewel-thieving
males at the beginning of the film, she has the most level head, and also
proves to be the most fearless out of her whole crew. On the other end of the spectrum is Kyoto, aka “Zombie
Queen”. While she’s only a strong
presence toward the end, she represents the “boss” of the movie; a relentless
monster with a brain that just about refuses to die. It’s sad that it’s 2015, and it’s still so
refreshing to see female characters that don’t just sit in a corner, scream,
and wait for a male character to save them, but in an age of constant sexism,
it’s a breath of fresh air.
I can also appreciate the wildly inconsistent special
effects, for one main reason: I’ll take
failed practical effects any day over even good CGI. I can’t stand computer effects. Even these days, when technological strides
are making them more lifelike than ever, there is still an obvious fakeness to
them; no matter how far along they come, I can’t see them replacing the look
and feel of reality. It sounds like a
stupid comment to make, but filmmakers seem so hellbent in their reliance on
computers that just about every blockbuster looks like a videogame. Well, if I wanted a videogame, I would go
play one, not go to a theater and spend $12 to watch something that I can’t
even control.
Rant aside, I can’t unanimously recommend “Junk”, simply
because its budget clearly gets in the way of (and ultimately sabotages) its
ambition. But as I insinuated earlier,
for fans of movies in general, there is a lot here to appreciate: The utterly slow-moving zombies are taken
right out of Fulci’s films (in fact, the obligatory sequence when they rise
from the dead strongly resembles a scene out of “Zombie”), a couple action
sequences seem to take their cue from John Woo, and there are probably many
other references that slipped by me, but that are fun to spot. You probably won’t love it, but it should at
least keep you entertained for most, if not all, of its short running time.
RECAP: Its budget sabotages its ambition, preventing it from
being anything more than a curiosity piece, but “Junk” partially overcomes its
wide range of weaknesses by being a gleeful homage to horror and action films
in general. Zombie fans may want to
check it out, though there are loads of better options withinin that
subgenre. Quite a bit of gore, but most
of it is just standard zombie grue, so if you’re looking for an extreme amount
of violence, you will more than likely be disappointed.
SCORE: 6/10
TRAILER:
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