KL Zombie (2013)

I like to find odd movies to review for the blog. Covering stuff that everyone is aware of gets boring after a while. To that end I’m always digging around Netflix for something unusual and that is how I found KL Zombie. As soon as I read that it was a Malaysian zombie flick I was sold. I mean I’ve never seen one so I figure most of you haven’t either. Plus, I’ve decided that my latest marathon would be zombie movies!

The plot is a bit confusing at times. It starts off with a group of friends meeting up to go do something, they never explain it. One of them is bitten by a dog that has apparently been eating toxic waste. The girlfriend of another man drives him to the hospital and when they arrive makes out with him. They both eventually turn into zombies and everyone they bite turns into zombies. The rest of the movie follows the non zombified characters trying to survive and along the way find each other.

Clearly someone is a fan of Shaun of the Dead. There are so many bits in this one that clearly refer back to it. The main character, Nipis, is a slacker that accidentally does okay when fighting the zombies. There is a sequence where the zombies are moving around but he is totally clueless about the change that has happened. He has a dumb friend that is bitten and turned into a zombie. There is even a part where one of the characters pretends to be a zombie and hams it up shuffling around a large crowd. I get that Shaun of the Dead has become the gold standard for zombie comedies, but copying scenes and sequences exactly? That was more than a little annoying.

When not “borrowing” so heavily from a much better movie KL Zombie does do a few things well. I thought that the zombies were decent looking. You don’t get much in the way of kills, but the makeup effect work on the recently deceased is good. If you pay attention closely you can notice that each zombie has a slightly different look, which had to have taken some effort to pull off. Some of the supporting characters were also fun. There is a school girl that is inexplicably the most effect zombie fighter of the group. She also has some funny lines. We also have what I thought was going to be a throwaway character of a police officer. But he shows back up later in the movie and is dealing with his son, who has been turned.

Up until the very end of the movie I was sort of enjoying it. It fell into the category of fairly harmless distraction. But then we get to the end and the zombies are dealt with. How you might ask? Well throughout the movie we have been treated to this inane con man selling a miracle cure all paste in a tube. Guess what cures the zombies? What the hell… Skip this one.

© Copyright 2017 John Shatzer