The Black Death (2015)

Original title: Phi ha Ayothaya

In 1565, European and/or Iranian traders brought the plague to today’s Thailand (for once, not on purpose). That’s what the history books tell us, at least. The Black Death imagines what really happened. Turns out the plague was actually a zombie virus (zombie type: fast, loud, dead).

The film concerns the misadventures of your typical group of rag-tag survivors who are thrown together when the village they are in is attacked by the ravenous dead. Eventually, our protagonists – among them guilt-ridden, heroic swordsman Thep (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit), star-struck lovers Mien (Sonya Singha) and Kong (Pongsakorn Mettarikanon), dual-hammer wielding female smith Bua (Veeree Ladapan), and deaf-mute prostitute Ploy (Apa Bhavilai) – barricade themselves in the local brothel, but we all know this won’t end too well for anyone involved.

Apparently, one way to end the druthers of the tiredness the zombie movie as a sub-genre has been in for a couple of years now at least is to set them in a different time and place than the usual contemporary USA. Though I do remember a pretty dire Vikings versus Zombies film, so it is no cure-all. At least, this works out nicely for Chalermchatri Yukol’s The Black Death, a film that takes us quite a few centuries into a past where everyone acted and looked suspiciously like people today but where the armaments to fight off zombies were a bit less evolved. The film makes this up to its characters by making nearly everyone some kind of badass or half-badass. Why, even the female half of the star-struck lovers is allowed to kill a couple of zombies between the mandatory bouts of simpering.

The film shows quite a few hallmarks of a low budget – the sets are a bit sparse, though Yukol makes nice use of the bad visibility in the jungle for a few suspenseful scenes, the actors aren’t too great, and not all of the costumes scream exactly 16th Century. It does however make good use of the opportunities that come with being a bit more under the radar, so there’s a bit more gore than you’ll find in more mainstream Thai cinema. While the film certainly has its melodramatic moments, it does feature the fine pessimism of every good zombie movie that argues that being a good person just might not save you; though it is not so cynical as to suggest that assholes will survive the zombie apocalypse all that longer. Clearly, no survivalists were involved in the production.

In general, the film’s script isn’t terribly deep, but it uses stock characters and standard situations with great aplomb, obviously going by the old adage that the most important thing about a film isn’t depth but that there’s never a boring minute; that’s a rule The Black Death manages to hold itself to quite nicely, racing from one cheap yet neat zombie set piece to the next, pausing for some very competent character moments, adding a bit of hopeless doom, some melodrama, and mixing it nicely. An added pleasure to all this is of course that the stock characters the film uses aren’t necessarily ones you get in many zombie films. Thep, for example, is a standard martial arts movie character, and I had a lot of fun watching what happens to the haunted swordsman type during a zombie apocalypse.


Even though the film isn’t particularly stylish, and the action scenes aren’t on the wild side of Thai action filmmaking, Yukol’s direction is generally fast and fun, with an eye for cheap, short, mildly gruesome bits, never lingering on anything so long you might realize quite how cheap it probably is, and always getting to the good stuff as early as possible. It also features some of the best “things hitting zombie heads” sounds I’ve heard in a long time. That’s probably not what a lot of people will call art. I, on the other hand, do believe there’s a lot of art (and craft) in turning out a neat, cheap and fast zombie/action movie like The Black Death. It’s just not the kind of art that’ll get you much praise outside of very specific circles.