Japan may produce a lot of classic cult horror movies like “The Ring” or “Ju-on”, but Tokyo Living Dead Idol is a refreshing – even comedic – take on the horror genre. This time, it takes the zombie genre and infuses it with its pop idol culture. What’s interesting to note is that a few of the main female cast members are from a real idol unit called SUPER☆GiRLS.
The story follows an up-and-coming idol called Miku who is bitten by a zombie after a concert. According to protocol, bite victims have to be kept in quarantine for 72 hours before being killed as a zombie. However, Miku goes on the run and hires a detective to help her find a cure before she turns into a zombie. Meanwhile, the whole country is on the search for her, including her two superfans, members of a zombie kill squad, and a female high school zombie hunter called Kisaragi.
To give this film context, apparently a ‘zombie virus’ has been plaguing many nations, and Japan happens to be the only country to quarantine its bite victims (other countries simply kill upon being bitten). This is supposedly because there’s a zombie council that uses pre-zombies as experiment subjects.
So while Miku goes on the run with the detective, she discovers that a possible cure to the zombie virus is being hidden by the zombie council. The reason? They simply want to give their zombie hunters more ‘challenging’ zombies to fight. This makes it sounds more like a manga-adapted plot (ie. OTT).
Plot aside, what makes this film hilarious – whether intentional or not – is the zombies themselves. They look more like people dressed in bad Halloween costumes, and while some zombies adhere to the ‘slow zombie shuffle’, some actually break out into parkour or b-boy action for no reason at all. There are also hilarious scenes involving idiot zombies that seem to communicate by… moans.
Let’s not even mention the zombie hunters themselves, who come in even more ridiculous costumes with ridiculous weapons – you cannot help but laugh out loud when you see them. The most normal-looking of them is a high school girl, Kisaragi, whose outfit consists of a school uniform and a sword.
This pure mind-boggling hilarity of a movie has crappy SFX (which seems intentional), unbelievable zombies, and over-the-top characters, although it’s actually peppered with a number of decent fight scenes. Tokyo Living Dead Idol is a uniquely Japanese genre, and it certainly entertains – only if you normally enjoy a lot of manga or manga-adapted action flicks. Because although the movie starts off rather promisingly, it descends into madness rather quickly.
