For anyone who has watched at least one zombie virus outbreak flick, Zombie for Sale drags one leg across very similar territory. Yet for anyone predisposed to watch at least one more, this light-hearted spin on the genre probably offers just enough innovation to be interesting.
Transposing ready-made tropes to the exotic setting of small-town Korea, this foreign-language feature available to rent or purchase on YouTube centres on the siblings in a family business that has seen better days. Lazily manning an under-frequented roadside service station, we discover the head of the household stimulating business by sabotaging the vehicles of passersby and then offering them overpriced repairs.
In a loosely parallel fashion, a major pharmaceutical company with a connection to the region is under investigation for vending similarly dishonest goods. As the news reports on falsified results of illegal clinical trials, we are already seeing the consequences on the ground – and, you guessed it, they include zombies.
So far it is all pretty boilerplate stuff.
But the glimmer in the story’s undead eye starts to shine when, after a couple of minutes, we watch the first zombie stumble menacingly towards a pair of elderly women hobbling down a dirt road in broad daylight. Whereas in standard zombie fare these two would make for easy cuisine, in this case the geriatrics dodge the monster’s grip without even breaking stride.
Such is the extent of the peril – at least initially.
Then patient zero meanders his way into a group of retirees gambling for pocket change, and he does manage, after a pretty evenly matched struggle, to take a chunk out of his first victim. And this is where the real novelty of the movie appears: instead of becoming the next denizen of the neighbourhood’s growing undead horde, the old man recovers the vitality of youth.
Instead of getting sick, he gets healthier.
This man also happens to be the patriarch of the service station family and discerns in this development not only a medical marvel but a windfall business opportunity. The gas station gets rebranded as a get-bitten station, and locals start lining up around the block.
Not everyone responds as favourably to the “treatment,” however, and before long we are back in traditional zombie apocalypse territory.
What sets this film apart, though, is all the low-key silliness along the way.
The youngest daughter in the service station family develops an absurdly amorous attachment to the first zombie, for instance, and even though a few characters react to him with typical generic hysteria, most take a more levelheaded and comically myopic approach. Such fixation on short-term individual benefits without regard for long-term collective consequences is a key feature of the film’s humour, but it also taps into a more substantial takeaway.
Ever since Dawn of the Dead (1978) set its end-of-civilization survivors in a shopping mall, the zombie has carried around on its slumped shoulders a more or less implicit overtone of mindless materialistic consumerism. As signalled by the title, Zombie for Sale explicitly taps into this legacy and then pushes the well-worn metaphor into fresh territory.
Instead of merely drawing negatively critical parallels between undead monsters and masses of unthinking participants in soul-destroying capitalism, this film suggests a positive alternative.
Without going into much depth or detail – and so succinctly you just might miss it – the film crosses all the t’s in the customary zombie-as-metaphor territory only to culminate by proposing a radically different ideal: the depiction of an economy not based upon profit and exploitation but upon generosity and gift.
In a simple climactic image – which I won’t spoil – Zombie for Sale suggests the potentially world-healing power of a society, like the family at its best, with self-sacrifice at its centre. Just this kind of world-upside-down personal exchange might be what can renovate our chronically sick civilizational system, it seems to say.
And just like that, as things start getting really interesting, the story ends.
Such an intellectually tantalizing finish may be only half-satisfying as the conclusion to a comedy and may leave all but the most fanatical genre fans hungry for something a little more brainy. But if we’re being honest, this is actually a pretty good day’s work for a zombie.