Review of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2023)
Seen in 2024.
A young Japanese man who played American football in college gets his first job working for a commercial filmmaking company, where he’s overworked and bullied. The zombie apocalypse comes as a relief.
The main problem here is the childlike writing. The film is a live-action complement to an animated TV series, both of them independently based on a 2018 comic. The film has the usual problems associated with lazy live-action adaptations of Japanese comics: It’s based around still frames rather than motion, with visually stylized, implausibly stupid and happy-go-lucky characters. As such, it’s an escapist fantasy. Naturally, it struggles to interface against its genre, where the zombies themselves are played straight: Pale, vascular, drooling black bile, and accompanied by humourless sound effects and musical cues.
There are scenes of postapocalyptic shopping, including one scene at Don Quijote (Donki), that briefly echo Dawn of the Dead (1978), but they have no symbolic dimension. Zom 100 is childishly uncritical of consumerism. Its titular bucket list revolves around marketed fad experiences like SUP yoga. The only gleam of intelligence in the script is the symbolic connection it draws between Japanese workplace culture and zombie horror, but this is done in ignorance of White Zombie (1932) and the Haitian slave-labour motif that came before it.