Junk (2000)

 

Director: Atsushi Muroga

Screenplay: Atsushi Muroga

Cast: Kaori Shimamura as Saki; Miwa as Kyôko; Yûji Kishimoto as Nakada; Shû Ehara as Akira; Tate Gouta as Ramon; Nobuyuki Asano as Jun; Koutarou Tanaka as Toraji; Kôtarô Tanaka as Toraji

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

An American scientist in Japan is experimenting with DNX, not to be confused with DMX as I had written, a North American rapper, but a green chemical, like the reanimation fluid from Re-Animator (1985), which can resurrect the dead. The female corpse he was working on, however, bites him when she is resurrected with DNX, showing this was an inherently bad idea.

Zombies are a Western import to Japan, and released in 2000, this feels like the beginnings of when, even if films were made in the eighties and nineties in the sub-genre, the influence of this version of the undead spun from George A. Romero's seminal zombies films  lead a pop culture phenomenon even beyond horror cinema. Junk is not that far from Resident Evil (1996), the first of that video game franchise which was, arguably, a huge push for the zombie as a pop cultural figure. This is not an unconventional zombie film either, pretty much following the tropes that would be built up from many films which would come. The difference is in how a jewel robbery is transpiring at the same moment this DNX mishap happens, a former nurse named Saki (Kaori Shimamura) the female getaway driver who wishes to get a car and a new life from this. Getting a call from the car dealership mid-robbery is just the start to the robbery souring, as is that the meeting with a crime boss is in the old factory where the zombie outbreak is transpiring, let alone that the boss was going to backstab the robbers anyway. Even the US army, or at least the branch involved with DNX experiments, get involved wishing to cover it up from everyone else, dragging in a Japanese scientist Nakada (Yûji Kishimoto) who was involved in the creation of the reanimation serum. Whilst there is a lot of Japanese subtitled English dialogue, it does present an obvious burying of US history on Japanese soil inherently in their prescience.

The actual film is conventional, a low budget zombie film mostly set in its factory location, one which as a result, when many more zombie films were made in the 2000s onwards, has become more conventional as a result. The director Atsushi Muroga would go onto the crime film series Gun Crazy (2002-3), and it feels like, in this mental space, he made Junk more of an action film with zombies within it, also a troupe of blurring the genres which would continue over the Millennium onwards. Truthfully, it felt very generic to a detriment to watch, but reflecting on it, there was a charm to even this, and I admit it is a bias for these low budget Japanese horror films which have their own moods to them. Out of them though, this one does not have a lot of the unpredictability that I prefer, making one of the weakest in this era, pretty much the "ArtsMagic" type of Japanese horror, a DVD distributor in the early 2000s who, before they left and went into specialist documentary releases in the modern day, released titles like Junk and Uzumaki (2000) in the boom of interest in films like Ring (1998) and Audition (1999) that Tartan Films acquired¹.

One of its biggest detriments is a universal cliché of zombies caused by how much of a trend they became in the Millennium after this film, the movies never trying to work around them in wacky, unpredictable or interesting ways, barring the one time shooting one in the head, the female zombie Kyoko (Miwa), just makes her mad and gives her a white wig.  Kyoko the zombie is one of the film's quirks, even if it is one of the few lurid aspects. In the drama, she is connected to Nakada, the reason that DNX was created, [Spoiler Warning] to resurrect her after a tragic car crash [Spoilers End], but onscreen, until she finds a leather coat long enough to be a dress, and inexplicably leather matching boots never explained, actress Miwa was clearly hired as she was comfortable being naked onscreen as a member of the undead. It is a clear selling point for the film even if it must have been uncomfortable for Miwa in terms of how she, mixing the morbid and the sensual as most of the film has her without prosthetic decay effects, and bare skinned, is spending the time in the dankest factory setting possible, which looks dirty and cold.  

The ending also changes the tone closer to an early Peter Jackson splatstick film, which is a positive, when the white wig leads to also being able to attack even without having legs, which is a nice change of pace for the better, and what I had wished Junk had went more with alongside the melodrama in it touching on. The action aspects are clearly inspired by Hong Kong cinema, two gun firing at zombies and wasting bullets into their chests, which feel just as cliché when they were replicated and lost the lustre of the likes of John Woo's films, which does undercut the film further.  Time has arguably undercut Junk as much weirder films from this period have stood out for their creativity - Wild Zero (1999), another zombie film ArtsMagic released with the band Guitar Wolf, deserves a personal re-evaluation as an openly silly zombie action film, involving men in golden right thongs firing rocket launchers, does not try to hide its low budget CGI, yet also managed to proceed progressive transgender politics by decades. Next to these films which have stood out for their creativity, Junk is still interesting to watch, entertaining in the right mood, but suffers from how much the tropes have aged.

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1) Whether it is the same ArtsMagic or not, this is the modern company's site.