Zombie World – first look

Director: ? (Fang Yinghua)

Release date: Possibly 2020

Contains spoilers

This is one of a slew of Chinese films, running in at just over an hour, that have appeared on YouTube through a couple of channels. The film, at time of writing, has no IMDb page. The Q1Q2 YouTube posting (now deleted) was 2020, and so that is what I have used as a date but this may be wrong. The Moxi movie channel page suggests that Fang Yinghua is the director. There is a director of that name (who did a couple of the Detective Dee films) but whether it is the same director or just the name used in vain I don’t know. The film is called Jiāngshī Shìjiè, with the Jiāngshī translated to zombie rather than vampire, but these are definitely kyonsi (to use a Japanese derivative of the word, and the word I have consistently used on TMtV).

Now, I will look at the film but I have decided a fully scored review is unfair as, whilst the film is usefully hard-subtitled, the English is a literally translation, without thought of form or sense and this makes the film hard to follow.

lined up

The film starts with a group of kyonsi hopping through woods and then lining up. We here a voice address them and already the subtitles make things difficult, confused even. It seems that humans are coming and that the damage was done to the kyonsi (and their king) 100 years before. It isn’t clear as to whether the subsequent Taoist attack is what they referred to but one of their number is protected and sent somewhere (equally, it isn’t clear if he is turned human and sent to the future or past, or just turned human). His mission is to kill the Taoist and his daughter, thus restoring the kyonsi king.

the robbers

So he wakes on a road, to the sound of weeping and mourning from nearby graves. He walks into town and is confronted by three robbers but is rescued by an intervention from Hong Pei Ling (known as Linger), the daughter of the Taoist priest Hong Tian Xiang. The robbers vow to get him later and he goes with her, saying he is looking for family as his parents are dead. She takes him to a house and suggests he bathes (and then is embarrassed when she later walks in on him).

Hong Pei Ling

His name is interesting, suggested at one point as Ah Rong it often comes up in the subtitles as Aaron. She gives him food once out of the bath and he questions what it is, to be told it is gelatinous rice (or sticky rice). He, of course, doesn’t eat it as this is a traditional anti-kyonsi foodstuff and, indeed, it was used due to the kyonsi attacks in the area. He has given the family name Qin as his distant uncle’s name (the name of the kyonsi king, and the same actor plays both roles), and he is introduced to a man of that name and calls him uncle. When her father arrives he realises that Linger and her dad are those he is meant to kill.

Kyonsi King

He does try to attack her a couple of times but always stops himself, due to circumstance, and – of course – with him currently human he falls in love with her. We get a group of kyonsi hunting police who are the comedic element in the film (though the dialogue based comedy falls flat due to the literal translation) and when they (nearly) capture a lone kyonsi, which then seems to bat off the Taoist’s moves, it manages to transport Ah Rong away, so they can have a conflab – in subtitled growls. He fakes an injury at that point, leading to being made to bathe in rice water (which steams when he is in it).

conversing with the kyonsi

I finally want to mention the ending, which seems to jump to a point where the Taoists (though perhaps they are no longer of that religion) have captured a kyonsi – or monster – in the graveyard and Linger is there in uniform with a troop also in uniforms. She suggests that the communists are going to wipe out all freaks and monsters and they lead a ‘burn him' chant, after which the film ends – which I guess was a little bit of pro-government posturing at the end of the film. Beyond the rather strange ability to appear as human, the lore sees black dog blood and sticky rice being used, prayer scrolls deployed (at the end of the film) and the kyonsi cops dressing as vampires and using kyonsi oil so they appear not to be human to the actual vampires.