31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Much better than expected, January 10, 2004
I had pretty low expectations of this film before watching it. Rarely is Junk mentioned in the same class and given the same amount of admiration as Wild Zero or Versus, other recent Japanese Zombie films. Junk was released prior to the aforementioned two other films and spearheaded the new wave of Japanese zombie films of the new millennia. I was expecting this film to be cheap-looking and boring but instead Junk turned out to be a wildly fun and inventive stab at the zombie genre.
3 men and a woman agree to pull a heist on behalf of the Yakuza by robbing a jewellery store. In exchange for the jewellery the yakuza promise a hefty sum of cash. The meeting point is set at a remote former military site about an hour's drive outside of town. The robbers arrive at the base and while waiting for the Yakuza walk around and find out that it may not be as deserted as they originally thought, as they stumble upon a lab containing various chemicals and a room containing a number of bodies lying on the floor, wrapped in white sheets. Unbeknownst to them, the military base has for some time been the site of a project by the name of DNX that has as a goal of bringing back the dead to life. As the dead rise, the robbers and the Yakuza's struggle to stay alive begins.
Junk borrows elements from so many other zombie films that it's hard to keep a track of, the most obvious influences in particular being Fulci's Zombie, Re-animator and Return of the living dead. The zombies bear a striking resemblance to Romero's, with their bluish skin and slow limping shuffle. They die the exactly the same way, through a gunshot wound to the head. In other ways however, the film is quite unique within the zombie genre, a combination undead film and high-octane Asian action shoot-em-up. Zombies and the Yakuza make for an entertaining mix. I also liked the idea of a "head zombie", who is not dumb like the others but instead acts as a brain for all of the undead, able to de-activate bombs and outsmart the U.S. military. This head zombie is not a ghoul of rotting flesh like the others but a beautiful clear-skinned Japanese woman who spends most of her time prancing around naked on screen and taunting her former husband, the scientist behind the DNX project who brought her back to life. Most entertaining of all is a battle between the head zombie and the female robber, a climactic show-down between two beautiful asian women with scores to settle.
The action is unrelenting in this film, a stable of Asian cinema. Junk doesn't overstay its welcome the way the 120-minute Versus does, instead delivering a brisk 83-minute package of gun-toting gangster action and zombie gore. Highly underrated but highly recommended.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CHILLING! DISTURBING! AWESOME!, August 18, 2003
It's difficult to put a fresh spin on zombie flicks these days, but this is one film that is refreshingly shocking. Start the premise with young punks heisting jewels, and meeting with Yakuza hotshots at an abandoned military base to sell their wares. As the deal begins to go awry, this sounds like the beginnings of a hot "young punks vs murderous gangster" flick. Yeah, we've seen this plot over and over, but these thugs about to take part in a gangland war are unaware that the military base is not THOROUGHLY abandoned. Experiments in reanimation have been in the works, and these sleeping corpses would like to feast on do-gooders or evil-doers, whoever is nearest to their slothlike chompers.
The blood and guts are plentiful. Nothing overly impressive in the way of special effects, but the zombies' body movements and "chew factor" are unusually creepy. I've seen so many zombie flicks that try to scare you with graphic gore, but few that deliver genuinely scary sequences and intriguing characters.
If you love zombie flicks, this is a MUST! If you are a rookie Zombie Watcher, this flick might just get you wanting to feast on more "Living Dead" spectaculars!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Zombies vs. Yakuza............., September 27, 2005
Junk is a Japanese zombie horror film, the film looked cheap and the gore was great but the film was deffinently bad but still fun to watch. A drug called DNX that is developed by a group of scientist looks simular to the serum thats used in re-animator to raise the dead and is also used for a top secret military project, the problem is one of the test subjects a naked Japanese chick escapes and attacks some of the scientists by eating them. Soon a bunch of jewel theives and Yakuza meet up in an abandoned warehouse but what they don't realise is that its the same place where the scientist are conducting there experiments so alot of flesh eating zombies appear. The film has some action scenes along with zombie horror that was done with a trashy european horror style like the lucio fulci films, most of the acting was awfull especialy the scientist who helps out the american soldiers most of the time I couldn't undurstand a word he was saying in english because of his thick Japanese accent. The film was filled with cliches but still I liked it for being a bad low budget gory zombie film that was funny as hell.
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