2000, Japan. Starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kenji Matsuda, Hideo Sakaki. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

It's no big secret that horror films, while enjoying something of a mainstream revival, are looking pretty abysmal. Everything that gets made, at least here in the good ol' US of A, baby, consists of disturbingly similar looking young stars acting like utter buffoons while some seemingly indestructible slasher stalks and dispatches them in ludicrous and surprisingly bloodless fashion. Stop me if this sounds familiar. The big difference between the current slasher film trend and the original that started with films like Halloween and Friday the 13th is that the first batch at least contained a couple of the originators of the genre. The current bunch of yahoos are ripping off the rip-offs, and that's never a good sign.

But while we're stuck enduring the likes of Valentine and Urban Legend: Final Cut, Japan has been quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - taking over the helm as the premiere home for horror. Whether it's by just doing the age-old traditions correctly or by creating something brand new, Japan has become a haven for people who want more from their horror films than carbon copy scripts, a hot new soundtrack of industrial/hip-hop/metal, and twenty-year-old clones all formed from strands of James Van Der Beek's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's DNA.

Among the many aspects of horror of which the Japanese have become the caretakers is the zombie film. As we've lamented elsewhere, no one save the occasional deranged fan seems all that interested in making zombie movies anymore. There is something apparently unmarketable about the entire concept, even though all horror films these days seem to have a soundtrack containing at least one track by Rob Zombie. His last name and popularity has not, unfortunately, translated into similar success for the zombie film. On one hand, I suppose I should be thankful that I don't have to see my most beloved of horror subgenres done up as a film starring Denise Richards and any number of indistinguishable male leads from popular shows on the WB. On the other hand, it'd be nice if a few underground film makers remembered the genre, or at least some grumpy Italians.

But if Japan has become the sole guardian of the zombie film, then at least they are in very good hands. With films like Junk, Wild Zero, and most recently Versus, Japan has been not just keeping the zombie film alive (or at least undead), it's been reinventing the whole concept without disrespecting the traditions we've come to know and love. The Japanese approach, influenced by everything from Resident Evil video games to Evil Dead, and of course George Romero's "Dead" trilogy, has been to approach the zombie subgenre as much as an action film as a horror film. While still maintaining the Romero style look and behavior of most zombies, they've also thrown in kungfu-powered super-zombies and Guitar Wolf flinging glowing guitar picks into the skulls of undead legions. The movies have proven that, while Japanese filmmakers know their material, they also know that they have to put a new twist on it to keep it fresh.

Versus, a zombie masterpiece directed by first-timer Ryuhei Kitamura, will invariably be compared to Wild Zero, also made by a first time film director, Tetsuro Takeuchi. Both are completely over the top in ways no one else ever dreamed of going over the top. Both are possessed of a hyperactive insanity and relentless pace. Both are full of zombies, and both ooze with cool. But where Wild Zero draws its charm and energy from likeable characters, sweet romances, and rock and roll cool, Versus relies entirely on high style and complete bad-assness, making it an altogether different kind of movie in that sense, though no less successful and certainly no less enjoyable.

The movie opens in feudal Japan with a battered samurai facing off against a gang of shambling, sword-wielding zombies. Immediately establishing a kinetic, Hong Kong style approach to the action, the samurai butchers his way through the undead only to come face to face with their apparent master, a wicked human priest. The samurai charges valiantly only to find himself sliced in two. If that's not a good way to start a film off, I don't know what is.

Skip ahead a couple hundred years to the present. Two convicts are running through the woods after being sprung from prison. They soon meet up with their benefactors -- a gang of stylish young yakuza so utterly and completely cool that they punctuate most of their actions with frequent "cool yakuza" poses. Sometimes, movies are cool. Sometimes, movies try so hard to be cool that they look ludicrous. And sometimes, movies push their ludicrous cool so far over the edge that they become cool again. Mere words can't express just how bad-ass everything in this film ends up being.

One of the cons is happy to see the young yakuza, who look like spoofs of the various characters from the Hong Kong Young and Dangerous films. The other con, prisoner KSC2-303, is more suspicious of their motivations. After all, he doesn't even know them. Why would they bust him out of prison? When he discovers that they also have a kidnapped girl in their car, he promptly breaks out in some amazingly cool kung-fury, resulting in him ending up with a gun, the girl, and a yakuza hostage. The choreography for the fights is pure Hong Kong madness. Anyone who has followed Japanese cinema knows that they have traditionally been fairly lackluster in their action choreography, never having become masters of it quite the way the folks in Hong Kong were. Well, all that's changing, and Versus is a perfect example of where it's being taken. Ultra-fast, acrobatic, brutal, and simply stunning to behold.

As is wont to happen when people are pointing guns at one another out in the woods, two people end up dead: one yakuza and the other convict. Unfortunately for everyone else, they don't stay dead. Mere minutes after finding themselves with brand new bullets in their brains, they're back up and ready to do more damage to whoever is most convenient. Everyone is fairly startled, but no startled that they can't continue to pump the recently reanimated zombies full of lead while KSC2-303 and the girl make their escape into the forest. One yakuza, their resident kungfu bad-ass, pursues while the others mill about, make plans, and try to figure out what the hell just happened. No one has any names in this, so we'll just refer to them as the leader (ultracool guy in ugly lime shirt), the weasel (little guy who whimpers and panics a lot), and the smart guy. He may not actually be smart, but he has long hair and wears spectacles and a sweater.

The first plan is to simply haul ass out of any forest where corpses suddenly spring back to life. The leader puts a damper on that plan by insisting that they must wait for the big leader, the guy who told them to free KSC2-303 and kidnap the girl in the first place. As the yakuza stand around hoping nothing more will happen, the weasel has the realization that they have just wandered into the forest meadow where they like to bury all their murder victims. Before you can say "uh-oh," dozens of zombie yakuza are bursting forth from their shallow graves. Like your traditional zombies, they are slow, decayed, and tend to moan and stagger a lot. Unlike your traditional zombies, these guys haven't forgotten how to use their guns! Why they would be buried with fully loaded weapons, and why those weapons would still work after being buried in the dirt for months, possibly even years, is a stupid question to ask in the context of this film. I mean, they're zombies! Rising from the grave with fully loaded, fully operational pistols should be the least of your reality concerns.

The yakuza take to an ultra-gory battle with the zombies while KSC2-303 and the kungfu yakuza bash one another senseless not too far away. Their fight leads them back to the meadow, and everyone stops fighting each other long enough to fight the zombies. Then, of course, it's back to fighting each other.

Elsewhere, two completely insane cops are hot on the trail of the escaped convicts. One of the cops, Officer, apparently lost his hand during the escape. The other, Fighter, is simply crazy as a shithouse bat and keeps ranting about his invincible kungfu while all the while seeming very much like Jeffery Combs at his most gloriously manic. Must be the hair. The cops aren't above indiscriminately murdering innocent bystanders, either, if it gets them a new car.

As the madness continues, the leader yakuza finally finds the second group of yakuza, this one mostly ultra-sexy females predisposed to the same habit of striking super-slick poses for no particular reason other than looking incredibly cool. With them is the main leader, who we quickly recognize as the same guy playing the wizard from the beginning of the film. When he learns that KSC2-303 and the girl are both at large somewhere in the woods, he decides his first course of action will be to slaughter every single yakuza he brought with him, thus turning them into a legion of super-powered undead gangsters. Only one woman, an ultra bad-ass kungfu fighter, escapes his murderous frenzy.

It is through him that we learn the woods are known in ancient legend as the Resurrection Forest for obvious reasons already illustrated. We also learn that he is indeed the self-same wizard from the opening of the film, a long-lived demon who has waited five-hundred years for his ancient samurai rival and his ancient princess to reincarnate at overlapping times. He needs the blood from both of them to open a portal to hell that will grant him some unspeakable power. KSC2-303, of course, is the reincarnation of the samurai hero, while the girl is the princess. They have no intention of going down without one of the goriest, most insane fights you'll ever see on film. Meanwhile, those nutty cops and the female kungfu bad-ass are still running wild as well.

And that, my friends, is it. The plot is simple despite a few supernatural embellishments. The entire film is basically one very well-done, highly stylized action sequence after another, with a heavy peppering of spoofing throughout. KSC2-303 is the ultimate bad-ass anti-hero. In one of the film's best moments, he offs a gangster zombie, bends down, picks up a pair of sunglasses, then slides them on as bad-ass music plays. The girl then gives him a "what the hell are you doing?" look, and he promptly takes the glasses off. The film is full of clever touches like that, managing to provide ultra-slick action while lampooning it as well. Versus delights in poking fun at the stylish absurdities of every action film that was written as a rip-off of John Woo, but does so with such gusto and reckless abandon that it also manages to outdo them all in sheer style and suaveness.

There was hardly any budget for this film, and what little there was went primarily to the special effects, which range from very good to mind-blowing (sometimes literally). A mixture of old-fashioned squibs, fake blood, and make-up effects combine with expertly done fight choreography and wire effects to cook up an endless parade of exploding heads and guts, buckets upon buckets of blood, and even homages to gore classics like the hole in the head from The Beyond and the shotgun hole through the gut from Cannibal Apocalypse.

To free up as much money for effects as they could, the entire film is shot using relative unknowns and a single inexpensive location: the forest. The technical mastery and slickness of the film prevent it from looking cheap, however, and while it may be confined to a single primary location, it's a big location that provides for a fair amount of variation in scenery. Occasional flashbacks to the back story involving the wizard, the princess, and the samurai further allow the director to make the most of his one location so that by the end, you hardly even notice. Not that I would care much, anyway. Many of my favorite horror films -- Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead -- restrict themselves to no more than a few locations. Some truly gorgeous cinematography further allows the director to make the most the situation and avoid ending up with a movie that looks cheap.

The acting really shines. No one has a name, as I said, which in itself is a wonderful spoof of horror films where characters are often completely forgettable and only have names as a matter of formality. The weakest link is the girl who plays the reincarnation of the princess, but she's still quite capable. Tak Sakaguchi as KSC2-303 plays a subtle, grim-faced cool that we haven't seen the likes of since Clint Eastwood hung up his six-shooter and started making movies for fans of the Lifetime network. The director claims he found Tak Sakaguchi on the streets in the middle of a real-life fist-fight with rival youth gangsters and realized he'd be perfect for the part! Wielding samurai swords, shotguns, and even a massive artillery cannon, he is so completely bad-ass that he's off the scale. The evil wizard exudes quiet cool as well. The cop Fighter is absolutely hilarious. Everyone else is there to get turned into zombies.

Musically, the movies sounds like a video game. Lots of techno and instrumental drum-n-bass stuff, or whatever. I guess there are lots of different subgenres for that stuff, but I don't know any of them. While I wouldn't rush out and buy the soundtrack, it works amazingly well within the context of the movie, sort of like all the techno that was in Run Lola Run. It lends an even more surreal feel to the film, removing it that much further from any reality with which you or I might be familiar.

Versus is a perfect example of "reinventing the legend." Too often, that term is used incorrectly by people who aren't reinventing anything. They are completely throwing out the old and making up their own nonsense. Versus, on the other hand, showcases a great knowledge of the zombie and action film lore that came before it and constantly tweaks it and pumps it full of adrenaline without ever showing disrespect. And it's nice to finally see a zombie film that doesn't involve people rushing to the nearest building and boarding themselves in.

Clocking in at very near a full two hours with very little plot, many have said the film could use some editing, which it may well get when it finally sees full release. I don't agree with those who feel the movie needs trimming. Maybe I'm just more patient, but there wasn't a single time when I felt bored or wanted to move things along. The movie maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish, and at least in my opinion, it does not falter. There is a lot more crammed into the story and the action than is evident perhaps on the first viewing. A simple plot should not be mistaken for no plot or for a bad a plot. And the visual jokes are so plentiful that you have to keep going back again and again, not that I mind doing that. Versus is among the very few films I watched, then immediately watched again.

As if all this complete and utter insanity wasn't enough, Versus also manages to be the first film in I can't remember how long that has a shock ending that is actually shocking as opposed to idiotic, that actually serves as a wonderfully appropriate and unexpected punctuation mark rather than seeming like some lame-brained after-thought tacked on to open the door for a potential sequel. The shock ending, of course, is a time-honored, or at least heavily abused, tradition of the horror film. Almost none of them make it work. Halloween pulled it off, but those since then have been few and far between. The Ring, though I don't know if I consider the end of that film to be a "shock" ending so much as it is just a creepy one.

Most shock endings have no basis in reality at all, and are simply slapped on without complete disregard for logic and total contempt for the intelligence of the audience. Friday the 13th films provide us the most numerous examples (gee, is Jason gonna jump out of the lake for no reason again?), but my favorite recent example was Tim Burton's disastrous Planet of the Apes, which posses a shocking twist ending so mind-numbingly stupid that it'll almost make you look favorably on censorship so long as it is applied to Planet of the Apes. When asked about it, Tim Burton obviously had no explanation, which makes sense, as there is no explanation for it. It was a moronic ending. Being the director though, he couldn't say, "Yeah, it was stupid." So instead he got all pissy and complained that not everything could be explained, that some things are there to "make you think." Of course, what it does is make you think the director and the scriptwriters were complete dolts. But I digress.

Versus comes up with the most ingenious way to spoof the shocking twist ending cliché: by making it work. As if the movie hadn't already given us so much, it ends things on an amazing note with one of the best twist endings in the last twenty years. It's really the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the melted fudge on top of the delicious clown sundae.

I can't say I like Versus quite as much as Wild Zero. I prefer Wild Zero's developed and lovable characters and rock-n-roll lessons. Junk, another Japanese yakuza versus zombies film, was fun on its own terms, but it's really been outclassed by Wild Zero and Versus. But as I said, Versus is a very different type of movie despite being possessed of the same wild energy and anarchic spirit. It's really not fair to compare it to anything else, because frankly, nothing else compares, and no other movie quite like it has ever been made. Or rather, lots of movies like it have been made, but never crammed all together into one movie with this much total insanity running rampant. Fans of action and zombies will be delighted. Fans of low-budget filmmaking will marvel at how much this film delivers with so little money with which to work.

And fans of spirited, no-holds-barred fun films will be overjoyed beyond the capacity for words.

Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Zombies, Year: 2000