Fantastic Fest 2011: Zombie Ass – Review

Alright! I am always pumped up for a Noboru Iguchi flick. Zombie Ass is a film with a toilet-obsessed imagination and things start to go badly when Maki finds a parasitical worm inside a fish they catch – and wolfs it down alive, in the hope that it’ll help keep her skinny. Not a bad plot twist to introduce a mad scientist who conducts experiments on parasites/zombies. Before the film started up I read in the program that the ass-obsessed madman Noboru Iguchi creates the most crap-tastic zombie movie ever to emerge from Japan’s Cinema sewer. Needless to say, my excitement grew.

Noboru stated he wanted to make a film about someone being infected by parasites, and wherein a lot pretty girls fart. He may have the mindset of a nine year old, but his execution is flawless. The story starts off right in the fray, knee-deep in zombie ass. The group is attacked by a crowd of poop-covered undead who emerge from an outhouse toilet, and seek refuge at the home of strange Dr. Tanaka and his daughter Sachi. Luckily, for everyone expecting some weird ass content in Zombie Ass, we see a whole lot of insane crap (literally!). It’s hard to even talk about some of the things in Zombie Ass without having to ruin my dinner plans later. It begs the question…can Megumi’s karate alone help them escape, or will she have to rely on the liberating power of farts to save the day?

Basically, if there’s any other movie aside from possible Dead-Alive that can contend with it, this is the most bizarre movie ever made outside of the US. Even for Japan, who have produced some of the craziest action/horror/sci-fi stuff anywhere ever (Miike especially can lay claim to some of it), it’s extreme and it’s certainly not for the faint of heart or easily offended. It’s for the fans, the die-hard group that just can’t seem to, on the contrary of most, be offended by anything. In fact, that’s the joy of watching Zombie Ass, which with a few scenes as exceptions where they get into real “Dramatic” moments, being that so much goes on, one thing tops the next, that it’s impossible to keep a straight face. This is quite simply a very cool film that should be seen by anyone who likes mutant-style insanity and ultra stylish film-making. I find that gore films are so much more fun when they’re mixed with over-the-top action.

The interactions of the group of high schoolers is entertaining. Then it shows a mysterious village with a doctor doing an experiments with some very large worms. I loved how the worms had their brain on the outside. Unfortunately, this film will not get a Japanese release until February 2012, so a trailer hasn’t been released yet but suffice to say that gore-hounds who seek out this freaky film will be treated to continuous stomach churning images of bodily dismemberment, S&M themed grotesquery, and scenes of complete random violence from start to finish, and the fact that the story makes very little sense (at least until the very end, when plot threads finally start to come together) should not matter in the least. You have to just LOVE Japanese cinema, I mean, where else could a director make it to the international A-list and do it without compromising his very particular boob, robot, poop, fart, and bizarre creature obsessed vision even the slightest? Zombie Ass is a one-of-a-kind film, and that is a feat unto itself.