Deadman Inferno (2015)

directed by Hiroshi Shinagawa

Japan

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If you're going to watch a "weird things happen to yakuza" movie, you can't do much better than Takashi Miike's Yakuza Apocalypse (except maybe with Takashi Miike's Gozu). That being said, if you're not looking for a cinematic masterpiece such as those and are content with a mid-tier zombie movie that will deliver the guts and nastiness you expect and not much else, Deadman Inferno is certainly not your worst choice, especially in the final act when it becomes almost an entirely different film in terms of quality and tone. I will be discussing spoilers towards the end of this review, but just in the form of non-main-character deaths.

The film begins a decade before any zombie business ever gets going, but with no less blood, as two yakuza groups exchange gunfire that ends in basically one entire side's death and the lasting injury of the group's leader. It's interesting that the movie decides to spend its set-up time on this instead of any kind of zombie lore; the zombies in this movie are generic creatures, not much depth to them, no explanation afforded aside from the conjecture of one character (more on that later). The film then skips ahead ten years to when the leader of the murdered group's close friend and non-blood brother is about to be released from jail. He has a daughter whose life he's been gone for much of, and she's a major player in the film herself. Her anxiety over her father's upcoming release date and not wanting to see him again leads her to run away from home with a friend, eventually ending up on Zeni Island, which is where the real action starts.

For a movie that's basically "yakuza vs zombies", the yakuza are the least interesting characters here. I much preferred watching the rest of the cast fight for survival rather than the leader and his brother, who were meant to kind of be the main characters. I think this is because of a crucial stumbling block that this movie keeps hitting: Parts of it are ostensibly meant to be funny, but it doesn't ever feel like it commits enough to the bit, either when it's meant to be funny or when it's meant to be serious. The movie is too middle-of-the-road for the jokes to work - the yakuza are neither treated with 100% drama and profundity, nor are they portrayed as goofy and weird, so the end result is just these stock video-game-character-feeling guys. The non-humorous parts of the film largely feel like it's going through the motions, being perfunctorily sad or tragic, but never doing anything original enough to complement its attempts at humor. This is all, as I mentioned, up until the ending. The last half an hour or so of this could have been made by a whole different director.

(There's also the issue that a lot of the jokes just aren't funny - there's a good helping of rape jokes in the form of one of the rival yakuza who is presented as a slow-witted oaf who can't control himself around women, which is supposed to be funny somehow. And, while they fortunately do remain fully dressed and non-panty-shotted, the leader's daughter and her friend are repeatedly referred to as "hot schoolgirls".)

Once everybody gets onto the island, a cast of characters is assembled that includes a bunch of yakuza, the two girls, a kind of lecherous doctor and his exes (zombies), the world's least responsible cop, his friend who believes he's on candid camera for most of the film, and of course the entire island's population, who have become zombies. The origin of the zombies is, as I said, not delved into that much, but the doctor is genre savvy, and quickly determines that, basing his observations off of the zombie movie canon, these are the runner-type zombies, and their vector of infection is likely an already-existing virus that was mutated by the introduction of a synthetic drug. (He's better at zombie analysis than he seems to be at practicing medicine, also he looks, like, 22.) This is a zombie movie that absolutely acknowledges that it's a zombie movie and has the characters fully aware that they are in a zombie-apocalypse scenario, which I personally prefer over something where people are running around panicking and inventing non-zombie-related names for the creatures, like "The Infected". No frills, no pretensions, this is a zombie flick.

The film moves at a steady pace until the final half-hour. That's when the main cast starts dying. It's like at the same time everybody who isn't already a zombie has a revelation about themselves and their lives where they realize that the zombies are a form of deliverance. Everybody in this is more or less either a bad person trying to go straight or an unremorseful criminal, and for their own personal reasons, past a certain point, people start choosing the zombies rather than living with themselves. And it's... kind of glorious. It's kind of cathartic. I particularly love when the doctor realizes both his exes are there, in zombie form, and just kind of goes "welp" and decides there's nothing he'd rather do than die at the hands of two women he at one point loved. There's some hidden magic going on on the part of the narrative that stops the viewer from going "What are you people doing?! Why aren't you fighting?!" It's not that the zombies are particularly tough to beat, although they are fast. The characters are all adequately equipped and there's a boat involved and everybody could probably have held out a little longer if they'd really wanted to. But they don't want to. They realize that they're so far gone, for reasons either personal or external, that they don't want to go back to being who they used to be. So they choose being a zombie. I'm drawing a comparison here that takes some serious mental footwork, but this honestly calls back to 1963's Matango and its question of whether or not, in a society that is rapidly decaying and becoming untenable, it might be better to voluntarily become something inhuman than cling to a humanity that you will inevitably lose.

So this is mostly worth watching for the ending. It's not all submitting to the bloody claws of fate, a lot of characters do fight back and they fight back magnificently, and some do survive, but it's not the ones you expect to survive. Also, for what it's worth, even though this is not a scary movie at all (it's just a bit gory), I went to bed right after and had one of the most disturbing nightmares of my entire life.