Ugh, I don’t know where to being with this flick. Zombie Fight Club is a train wreck, plain and simple. It’s an amalgamation of a bunch of different ideas, which are mainly rip-offs, slapped together loosely with duct tape and staples. It features some of the worst CGI to ever grace the screen and a plot that completely morphs into a different movie at about the hour mark, but the different movie manages to be even worse than the one before it. Hey, on the bright side, the flick has some smoking hot Asian chicks on screen. I suppose that’s probably enough to warrant giving it a watch at least once… on second thought, maybe not…
PRODUCT INFORMATION
DISCS: 1
RUN-TIME: 95 min
ASPECT RATIO: 2.35:1
RESOLUTION: 1080p
AUDIO: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 DTS-HD MA, Mandarin 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Mandarin 2.0 DTS-HD MA
SUBTITLES: English, Mandarin
REGION: A/1
RATING: NR
PRODUCTION DATE: 2014
RELEASE DATE: Feb 2, 2016
PLOT SUMMARY
In a corner of the city, in a building riddled with crime… there is an outbreak of zombies. When one young woman (Jessica C, Double Trouble) witnesses her boyfriend falling victim to the zombie horde, she must team up with a police officer (Andy On, The Viral Factor, Special ID, Cold War) in order to stay alive and escape the building. But the once warm-hearted chemistry teacher, Wu Ming, is now the zombie leader following the chaos, which has transformed him into a cruel, vicious and formidable opponent.
Ratcheting up the terror, an evil organization has begun pitting humans against zombies in a malicious killing game. The good side of humanity has seemingly all but vanished and a world of uncertainty awaits…
Terence Yin (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Special ID), Michael Wong (Transformers: Age of Extinction, Firestorm, Seven Swords), Jack Kao (Shinjuku Incident, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate) and recording artist MC HotDog also star in this no-holds-barred, martial-arts-meets-walking-dead masterpiece!
MOVIE
Zombie Fight Club gets right on with ripping off two movies at once, with The Raid and REC 2 springing to mind instantly. A group of soldiers can be seen “raiding” a building for drugs, and the drugs happen to turn people into rampaging zombies. The movie and I use that term loosely, follows a few different people in the building, one being a member of the riot group, Andy On, another being a beautiful and scantily clad Jessica C, and a few other people of no importance, save for a professor who is celebrating his daughter’s birthday party with a bunch of hot chicks. The flick goes with this plot for about an hour, giving us some terrible, terrible CGI to deal with. We have fake blood, fake fire, fake gore, and fake people. Some of the practical effects on the zombies aren’t too bad, but a few are just downright insulting to the eyes; especially the random morphing toothy chest zombie (don’t ask, as it makes no sense and was never talked about again). After a few more terrible scenes later, one which rips off The Walking Dead in relation to covering yourself in zombie gore to disguise yourself, we get to the hour mark and the movie suddenly jumps ahead a year, where we are finally introduced to the actual Fight Club in the name.
This is where the ripping off of other works is in your face. Let’s see if this sounds familiar. We have a former good guy, whose daughter ends up being killed and turned into a zombie. The good guy is now a bad guy and governs a place that hosts zombie fight clubs with chained up people. The bad guy, let’s call him the Governor, has his daughter chained up, as he is hoping that a cure will come along and he can save her. (If you guessed The Walking Dead as the material being ripped off, you’re wrong. It’s The Notebook.) Meanwhile, the two survivors of the building, Andy and Jessica are fighting in this underground fight club for food, water, and freedom. How they got there, I don’t know.
The only benefits I can give to the second part of the movie is first, the practical effects were vastly improved on the zombies, featuring a bunch of stellar looking rotting corpses, and secondly, the other benefit is the absolute smoking hot Candy Yuen (surprisingly enough, not a stripper) in a tight leather S&M suit. There are a few other lookers as well, but for some odd reason, this seems to be the land of women with no nipples.
Zombie Fight Club is a flick with an identity crisis. It just doesn’t know what it wants to be. Does it want to be a campy zombie film with some over the top action or maybe a gritty flick with some emotionally dramatic scenes? It tries to do both, but fails on all accounts. I might have been more forgiving to Zombie Fight Club, provided they removed some of the terrible CGI and went all practical instead, as there are moments of some original ideas and outstanding zombie effects, but alas, those scenes are few and far between. Still, smoking hot Asian chicks, amirite?
BLU-RAY
Zombie Fight Club is being released on Blu-ray from Scream Factory is being released on Blu-ray from Scream Factory in an almost bare bones release. You have a trailer and a quick 3-minute feature on some of the stunt work in the movie. It’s nothing to write home about.
On the video and audio side of things, you have a nice looking transfer that presents some solid blacks and vibrant colours. The only downside to this is that all that shitty CGI is going to look way too clean. As for the audio, it’s pretty interesting what is happening here. The movie is actually a mix of English and Mandarin, so how you choose to watch the movie will affect your viewing pleasure. Your first option is to watch the movie in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio English, but my goodness is the dubbing some of the worse I have ever heard. They even dub the English parts of the movie, so the voices are way off. I couldn’t do it, so I switched over to the 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio Mandarin, with optional English subtitles for the Mandarin parts (don’t worry, you can have English subtitles for the entire flick if you like, but fair warning, we get some lovely Engrish in parts) and the movie was way better that way. Yes, you have to do a bit of reading, but it will surprise how much of the movie is spoken in English. Whatever you choose, the audio will be loud and clear, which is great.
BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES
- Trailer
- Zombie Fight Club Stunts
VERDICT
Zombie Fight Club gives you two shitty movies for the price of one. There are a plenty of other great zombie movies out there, which this movie ripping off in one way or another, so why would you bother wasting your time on this one? It seems like Scream Factory felt the same way, as the movie is practically a bare bones standard Blu-ray release. Still, hot Asian women wearing short shorts and push-up bras. My heart can’t take it.
RATING
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| One zombie brain for the movie and Blu-ray… |
