Versus

A Review by Jon Walmsley - trioxin.wordpress.com

I love my Asian zombie films. Junk and Bio-zombie were reasonably decent if rather cliched, while Wild Zero and Stacy were full on classics. Then there is Versus - a Zombie film I’ve had on my shelf for some time now waiting for an appropriate time-slot for viewing.

After the standard battle I usually have with foreign language DVDs (spoken language with subtitles or dubbed into English? - I went the subtitle route) I chilled out ready to enjoy some zombie fighting action. Well, what I got was a whole film of choreographed gun battles and martial arts, with a few token zombie thrown into the mix. The story is tosh - some nameless gang dudes kidnap another nameless woman and meet an escaped (nameless) prisoner in a forest. The prisoner and woman escape into the trees just as the living dead (who have been buried there by the aforementioned gang) return to life. Now we have loads of gunshots, fights and cool slow-mo posing for the entirety of the film. Sure, the fights are pretty cool and some of the gunfights are well put together, but that is all that goes on for about 2 hours.

Not that this was a bad film, it was just more John Woo than George Romero, with not nearly enough originality or zombie gut munching to satisfy me. Maybe I was just expecting a different sort of film, and I may enjoy it on a martial arts \ gunfight action level next time I watch it. Oh well, I think I’ll just go watch ‘Stacy’ again instead.