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 Who knows what it says? It's all in German. I thought they lost the war - why
haven't switched over to American yet? The only words I recognized on the back
were "zombies" and the last phrase of the write up, "...and everybody fights."
What does that mean? The front of the DVD says "Everybody Fights Junk." I
never figured out if Junk was the name of a zombie or what, but I suppose it
takes a certain amount of guts to call your movie Junk. I keep waiting for someone to make a movie called Crap. 1999, 83 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Since the Italians have gotten real lazy about feeding our appetite for movies
about living dead running amok and chewing on guys with wimpy looking beards,
there's been a void in the arena of films that not only are real gross,
but also aren't terribly interesting or well made. Thankfully, the Japanese,
having honed their film skills on movies about gangsters that shoot a whole lot
of other gangsters (or did they just watch a lot of Hong Kong movies?), have
now turned their attention to the zombie genre. This is good and bad. It's
good, because these films have a slick, action movie/music video quality to
them and characters that at least try and give the zombies a kick in the pants.
The Italians always seemed to gawking at the zombies and were never armed
with anything more than something like a vase or their ugly broads. The movies
also suffered from looking so unprofessionally cheap. You look at something
like Burial Groundor City of the Walking Deadand you wonder if they were just trying to get as much movie in the can in a
day as humanly possible as opposed to plotting out any scenes that were
visually stimulating, let alone told any kind of story. I understand the
premise of any zombie movie is fairly straight forward: guys with cruddy faces
shambling around. That's cool, that's what I pay to see. But I would like the
filmmakers to care enough that they just don't dump goop on the extras' heads,
yell "action" and then film away as these people wander to and fro with close
ups of other extras getting bites taken out of their foam rubber nipples.
Surprisingly enough, that whole scene wears pretty thin after the first three
times you see it done. Let's class the thing up a little - make it at least
look like something other than the backyard movie you tricked your mom into
letting you make with all her church friends. I did mention there was a bad
aspect to the Japanese turning to the zombie genre. Along with their technical
prowess with gangster shoot out movies, they also bring their tired old
gangster shoot out story with them. You know how it goes down - guys steal
crap, set up buy, get double crossed, shootings result, zombies attack. It
would have been nice if we could have gotten away from that lazy bit of story,
but I suppose I'd take that instead of having to look at That 70s Zombie
running around the part of Rome reserved for such films.  If you expect a little more out of your zombie movie than just having a tired
old gangster movie cliched grafted onto it, you're in luck. The makers of Junk,
having realized that the best kind of rip-off is actually a melding of several
different movies you've ripped off have strip-mined ideas from a couple of
other films. The most obvious one is The Re-Animator. We all remember when
Herbert West was running around his basement with syringes full of green
glowing goop injecting it into any dead thing that was within that film's low
budget. Well, here we are over in Japan and you've got
yourself some American doctors shooting up some naked Japanese chick with green
goop and wondering when she's going to get all re-animated. Now, what in the
world are Americans doing over in Japan working on a project to make zombies?
If you've seen some of those Return Of The Living Dead movies, then you know
darn well that part of the U.S. military's black budget stuff (special ops to
you!) involve re-animating corpses for some reason. This is along with the
psionic stuff they keep trying to develop and the cyborgs as well as the
various monstrous creatures and bugs they are breeding in secret labs all
around the world in low-budget movie-friendly places like Toronto and Bulgaria.
It's never been very clear to me why in the world any army would want to
develop a platoon of flesh eating zombies when it would be cheaper and easier
to just drop daisy cutters on everyone. With these stupid zombie soldiers,
you've got to worry about housing them until the big mission (we know how that
usually turns out), transporting them to whatever out of the way place they
usually end up in (how many times have we seen these transport trucks, wreck,
get hi-jacked, or just hit a pothole, disgorging a few famished corpses?), then
you've got worry about keeping them under control once you let them loose on
the battlefield, and finally you have to mop them all up once they're finished
(or are so far out of control, you're frantically hitting the self-destruct
button
on the lap top that is supposed to be controlling those suckers). It becomes
fairly obvious that any military zombie program is bound to be one of those
programs that run into what we military industry types call "real-world
interface
challenges" that also affect other silly money pits like the V-22 Osprey.  How precisely does Junkmanage to work all these different plot points into one
semi-stylish zombie confection? It's as easy as the ridiculous coincidences
this movie hangs its story on. Akira, Jun, Saki, and another dude whose name
escapes me, but doesn't really matter since he gets whacked in the early going,
are all part of this gang of jewel thieves. Saki is a woman who is driving the
getaway van and she parks it outside the mall where they're going to knock over
the jewelry store. The other three guys go into the store once they put on
their Halloween masks and proceed to steal all the really cheap looking
jewelry, necklaces, and rings inside. For reasons unknown (presumably aesthetic,
but who can say for sure), one of the dudes is robbing the place with a sword.
He also has a gun, as do his partners, but he's waving this big sword he's
carrying around, which I would think would make it difficult to smash and grab
and keep the employees under control. And it turns out that the employees are
difficult to control because they keep trying to push the little magic button
that will bring the Tokyo P.D. down on these heisters. One guy gets knocked
out for his troubles, but a woman manages to stab Akira in the foot with some
scissors. This just goes to show you that maybe one guy should be in charge of
herding all these heroes into the back and keeping an eye on them while the
other two remain out front grabbing as much stuff as possible. You should also
probably invest in some steel-toed boots. With Akira botching things, they
have to cart his screaming ass out of there and race back to the van with their
loot. While all this is going down, Saki is in the van on her cell phone
trying to deal with a car salesman that she is planning to buy a Porsche from
with her chunk of the winnings. I like a woman who plans ahead. They speed
off, crashing into the odd vegetable stand that is mysteriously parked in the
mall parking lot and contact their fence. Akira is screaming his fool head off
the whole time, claiming that he is dying, while he's friends tell him it's
just a nick and stuff donuts into his mouth to shut him up. The fence tells
them that he'll pay a bazillion yen (about thirty five real dollars) and he has
just the place to meet them. How does the old warehouse on the outskirts of
town from Evil Dead Trapsound? Meeting your fence in such an out of the way place is probably about
as smart as getting your foot stabbed with a pair pinking shears during a hold
up, so they immediately agree to this and slap each other high fives and begin
picking out the color of their Porsches. 
After that fetus went on a rampage and did all that crazy crap in Evil Dead Trap, the deserted warehouse on the outskirts of town rents a lot cheaper than
you would expect. This makes it not only the perfect place for gangsters to
doublecross each other, but also for the American military to conduct covert
zombie
experiments in. The only parts of this whole scheme I understood was that
these experiments were being done on the Q.T. and that the people playing the
Americans are so bad you wish that America would end its military presence in
Japan if it meant that they had to find new villains for their zombie movies.
Speaking a stilted form of English, usually reserved for the local newscast
here in New Mullet, Missouri, these guys stand around talking about what a
secret project they got going
and how it's all screwed up. This is where the Japanese scientist enters the
picture. I don't know if he just learned English the week before and wanted to
show it off, but he insisted on speaking almost all his dialogue with these
soldiers in English. At least I'm assuming it was English because it elicited
the monotone-like responses from the soldiers that makes you think a porn
star dubbed their lines. The problem with the Japanese scientist is that
whereas the Americans' delivery of their lines is unbelievably bad, his delivery
is incredibly unintelligible. It sounds like a deaf guy trying to talk or
something. I understand that American is probably his second language, but
this is a movie you are expecting people to pay to see and you have a part that
gives us the backstory on your dopey zombie experiment, so you of all the
characters need to be understood. The movie is really brought down whenever
these amateurs are on screen and remind you that this movie is pretty much a
bottom of the barrel affair, budget and talent wise. They manage to get by
with fast paced action and some decent looking action scenes (within a
low-budget warehouse-bound movie), but having the military involved and
represented by two soldiers and a Japanese scientist reveals what a thread-bare
production you're dealing with. Part of making low budget efforts like this is
to camouflage your lack of resources. Saying that this is some big secret
military project and then having a guy or two dressed up in army fatigues
yelling "Roger that" into a microphone every so often isn't a very good
demonstration of resource management and makes an admittedly weak story, even
weaker. Once the gangsters double cross each, the zombies show up and take a bite out
of one of them. Instead of immediately leaving the premises, they decide that
no dang zombie is going to get over on them and they go further into the
warehouse after them. Meanwhile, the jewel thieves likewise stay so that they
can
go after the bad guy gangsters and get their jewels back. In the midst of all
the excitement, Akira seems to have forgotten that just moments ago he was
stabbed in the foot and claiming to be dying, because the rest of the movie he
pretty much runs around without any problems at all. Maybe there's something
to that donut remedy they were using in the getaway van. With all the
criminals on the loose against the zombies, the military tries to remotely
detonate the whole place, but as luck would have it, one of the zombies is a
sexy computer hacker (there's a twist I didn't see coming!) that prevents this,
so the military dispatches their Delta Force type team to the warehouse to blow
the roof on those suckers manually. Oh and the Delta Force consists of one
soldier and the incomprehensible Japanese scientist (yeah, those two should be
able to handle it). The remainder of the movie consists of zombies taking
bites out of people and zombies having chunks of their heads and chests blown
off by the gangsters. Akira and Saki end up being the only survivors and have
to face off against the computer hacker zombie, who has someone become
superpowerful (we know this because she changed into a leather dress and knee
high boots and now sports white hair and white contacts). None of that made
any sense of course, but you don't really notice much beyond the chick clad in
leather and the fact that she gets a pole put through her and then gets chopped
in half with a shovel. You would think that would slow her down, but her top
half kept attacking until it got chucked onto a power transformer. Saki blows
up the warehouse and you get one of those classic action moments where she and
Akira are crashing through a window as the entire place goes up like it had
napalm dumped on it. The movie doesn't really break any new ground in the
zombie genre and the story suffers from continuous lapses of believability, but
things go on at a breakneck pace and the updating of things with the kinetic
far-eastern action style (though it isn't as kinetic as it really ought to be)
make this a decent zombie movie and a welcome respite from all the plodding
meatballers we're used to. I found this easier to digest than something like Versus, which was a half hour longer and had characters that didn't even have names.
At two hours, Versus had all kinds of time to pose and bore the viewer with its constant running
around the forest. That movie was more a samurai thing anyway, worried about
reincarnation, gates to some other world and guys with fancy haircuts. Junk is a throwback to a time when you got yourself a bunch of re-animated corpses
and just tried to kill them before they killed you. I know Versus has its fans, but I suspect those are the types of people who like to see guys
with swords standing still, with their backs to each other, while the camera
spins around them over and over. That's time that can be spent blasting the
undead! Junk follows the more traditional zombie movie model and if it can be
criticized for being a bit too slavish to what has gone before, it can also be
praised for delivering a straight ahead gut muncher that doesn't waste a lot
of time and wades right into things with fairly wild abandon.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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