Rule No. 1 of Zombie Fight Club? Do not talk about Zombie Fight Club. Not because it’s secret, but because the Taiwanese flick is not worth talking up.
This being a source for film criticism, however, we’ll break that rule to tell you why. One random day, in a Taipei tenement that makes the Cabrini-Green public housing project of Candyman look cozy, activity is abuzz from floor to floor: a businessman being held ransom, a Halloween party, a raid on a cartel operation, a courier making an inordinate amount of package deliveries for a single address.
One of the latter’s stops is the party-central apartment of sleazebag David (Derek Tsang, The Thieves) and his way-too-cute-for-him girlfriend, Jenny (Beach Spike’s Jessica Cambensy, here as pure eye candy, romping around in a white bra). David receives a bag of bath salts (not the Bath & Body Works kind) from his stateside cousin, and as luck would have it (shades of Bath Salt Zombies!), anyone who swallows the pill turns into a member of the undead, complete with a taste for human flesh; anyone bitten by the undead becomes a — hell, you know how this works by now.
The virus spreads through the building faster than the film is paced. No plot exists; director Joe Chien (2012’s even worse Zombie 108) is content with just stacking one zombie attack after another (like a corpulent gangsta getting his penis bitten off) atop one escape attempt after another (such as Jenny and an eventual law-enforcement hero played by Blackhat’s Andy On mowing down shuffling corpses by driving a BMW down a hallway).
The initial tone is such that Sam Raimi could knock something like this out of the park in his sleep, whereas after an exhausting hour of scene-Xeroxing, Chien realizes he has nowhere to go. So he just stops suddenly and bunts his timeline one year forward. At least doing so allows him to justify the film’s potentially litigious title, as the zompocalypse has turned the world into something Beyond Thunderdome, where survivors are forced to battle the undead in gladiatorial games.
Sounds like a different movie? It feels like one, too: one inferior to what we already were watching. In wanting to be everything without earning it, Zombie Fight Club emerges as nothing but a collection of awful clipping paths. As Asian low-budget trash goes, however, it reeks less than that Sushi Typhoon nonsense. —Rod Lott