Rampant

Somewhere roughly between the 1600s and 1800s, a small Korean kingdom is under threat from demons (who behave remarkably like western Zombies - for Korean purposes, they’re demons, but I’ll refer to them as zombies to stop cognitive dissonance). The crown prince, who has been living in idleness in another kingdom, returns to carry out his brother’s last request, bringing his wife and unborn child away from the turbulent court, only to find out the petty politics of succession are the least of his worries, as unrelenting hordes of zombies begin attacking first an outlying village, and then the imperial palace…

My knowledge of Korean history before the Korean war is pretty sketchy, so I spent way longer at the beginning of this film than I should have wondering “when does this take place? Where are all these other cities? What nationality are the westerners who sold the rival warlord guns – they sound Dutch but that could be anything, really”. And then I realised this was not something I should be thinking about, I should be thinking about how well this carries out its goals – yes, this is your standard zombiethon, but it’s got enough oddities of design and presentation to make it a bit more interesting. The arc of our hero being initially a careless playboy who’s pretty much dragged into involvement with the people who he should, by rights, be ruling over, gives us some reasonable character work, and even the annoying-comedy-relief gets noticeably less so as the story goes on. This isn’t by any means even the best zombie movie of the year, but it still functions pretty well as a good meat-and-potatoes version of Korean action with a twist.