The Stop Button

For a micro-budget horror movie, Gangnam Zombie isn’t unsuccessful, but it also isn’t much of a success. The setting is decent—locked in a trendy office building on Christmas Eve, except Zombie doesn’t have the money for Christmas decorations. It also doesn’t have money for zombie special effects, so it’s more like they’re rabid vampires (complete with the teeth). Except then, the opening titles imply a bad batch of COVID-19 vaccine causes zombie vampirism. Only for it to not. I had been thinking how Rona would give cheap horror movies plot points for a decade, but….

It seems like they had the Dawn of the Dead content and had to pad it out. Gangnam fully embraces the no-budget pad; there’s a flash-forward prologue (which gets entirely repeated later on), there are too long opening titles, frequent stock footage montages, lots and lots of slow motion (including annoyed actors walking slowly only for it to get further slowed down even more), then six minutes of end credits. Gangnam’s greatest struggle is making that eighty-one-minute runtime.

After the zombie (but, wait, are they vampires?) action introduction, where we learn despite buying a stock movie score package, Gangnam didn’t buy a fight sound effects pack. So there’s rarely any sound when the good guys hit the zombies. Gangnam can’t afford gore, can’t afford sound effects, so it’s a surprise when director Lee does an entirely adequate job. Other than all the slow-motion nonsense.

And also, it’s not like Lee takes advantage of the micro-budget status. There are approximately twelve different zombies for most of the movie, recognizable once you start paying attention. Instead of playing up that familiarity, Lee tries to pretend there are more. There are never a bunch more.

Oh, they also pad with a break dancing sequence. It comes back way too briefly for one of the fights. The breakdancing is more impressive than the fights, which hinge on hero Ji Il-joo being a taekwondo badass. There’s a lot of kicking. But Gangnam is lousy at fight choreography; the movie’s “hook” is Ji fist-fighting zombie vampires, and every time they do a sequence, it’s a disappointment. Even there’s the break dancing, they don’t do enough of it. Like they had the good idea but then didn’t shoot enough of it.

There is one slightly better fight scene when leading lady and not damsel in distress, Park Ji-yeon, helps Ji fight the main zombie (Jo Kyoung-Hoon).

I couldn’t bring myself to check the runtime breakdown, but most of the movie seems to be the first-act setup. Ji’s in love with coworker Park, who thinks he’s a taekwondo dork. They both work at a YouTube channel run by Choi Sung-min, who has a bad business model and worse ideas for YouTube videos. Tak Tu-in plays Ji’s doofus bro sidekick, which Tak grates against. Choi’s a dipshit who’s sexually harassing Park; before the zombies show up, the movie’s mainly about Ji trying to empower Park to stand up to Choi like she stands up for young women she encounters being threatened by men.

Gangnam doesn’t say much for humanity.

About a third of the shots look good, with the rest being either mediocre or vaguely warped, like cinematographer Kim Do-young didn’t convert the iPhone-shot footage correctly. But it’s micro-budget, and it looks all right for it.

Ji’s not good, but he’s also not bad. Park’s a bit better, but she gets even worse material than Ji. Choi’s a good zombie movie dipshit.

Speaking of zombie movie standards—Gangnam’s zombies run. Except when they don’t. The movie doesn’t try to explain the zombie rules at all.

Gangnam Zombie’s not good, and it’s not so much successfully inventive as competent. Director Lee’s really good at making things monotonous.

An actual score—instead of the melodrama music pack—would help a lot.