In short: Deadman Inferno (2015)

aka Z Island

Original title: Zアイランド, Z Airando

Ten years after the usual raid and revenge cycle left yakuza boss Hiroya Munakata (Sho Aikawa) with few friends, expelled from the yakuza, with a bad leg, and having to go through the indignity of honest work, his best underling Takashi (Shingo Tsurumi) gets out of jail. Munakata has been taking care of Takashi’s daughter Hinata (Maika Yamamoto) for all these years. Alas, the girl’s a teen, so she isn’t awaiting her father with open arms to mend things between them but has run off with her best friend Seira (Erina Mizuno) to go to a place called Zeni Island that holds sentimental value to the family.

Unfortunately, Zeni Island also turns out to be the place of a fresh zombie outbreak (apparently caused by a combination of the flu and homebrew drugs). Now, the teen girls turn out to be rather competent martial artists, but it clearly is still a good thing the ex-yakuza are coming for them, also bringing with them Hinata’s mum Sakura (Sawa Suzuki), also rather good in a fight.

To make matters more difficult than a mere zombie problem, also making their way to the island are exactly the particularly nasty examples of yakuza-dom responsible for the fall of Munakata’s gang ten years ago, so there is a bit of vengeance in the cards too. If anyone makes it through the zombie hordes alive, that is.

Despite the zombie genre by now basically having been crossed with every other genre imaginable, there really aren’t too many zombie versus yakuza movies, so I’m willing to call Hiroshi Shinagawa’s Deadman Inferno original in this regard, as well as in its use of something that can only be called “Chekhov’s Japanese Ragga Playing Boat-Mounted Sound System”. Plus, it stars former V-cinema hero Sho Aikawa doing exactly what I want him to do, being gruff and honorable and slicing zombies left and right.

Tonally, this starts out as one of those deeply silly yet deadpan Japanese comedies (getting some decent laughs out of yakuza-style manliness treated as absurd as it is) but hits some surprisingly bleak notes before the climax, killing off characters a comedy really shouldn’t kill in rather troubling ways, before ending nicer than a lot of pure yakuza movies do. It’s a bit confusing and probably not to the taste of anyone expecting films to hold closely to formula but I found this bit of unpredictability in a film I didn’t expect any from rather refreshing. As I found the fact that all female main characters here are as capable fighters as the men, which doesn’t necessarily save one from a zombie horde, of course.


Otherwise, this is simply a fun straightforward and well-paced little film with perfectly competently made action sequences – that perhaps suffer a bit from Shinagawa’s clearly deep and abiding love for slow motion – as well as a game cast every viewer of Japanese genre cinema will recognize and love, and some nice if not spectacular gore effects.