It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Season One director Seong-hun Kim carries over to the premiere of Season Two of Netflix’s Korean Period Zombie Extravaganza, Kingdom (directing duties are taken over by In-je Park for the rest of Season Two), and holy crap! I know I complained a bit last year, when the season finale cut to credits just as a massive horde of running, snarling, horrifying zombies sped toward the outer barricades of Sangju, where our main heroes, Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ji-Hoon Ju), Yeong-shin (Kim Sungkyu), and Moo-young (Sang-ho Kim) are stunned to see zombies in the daytime, but the Season Two premiere is non-stop action.
I think they made the right choice opening the season with this epic 20 minute battle – and by battle, I mean running as fast as you can while an army of zombies chase you full speed. By the time the episode slows down to breathe, we are fully invested in the new status quo (the undead had only come out at night before the finale) and things look amazingly grim.
While this is going on, Seo-bi (Doona Bae) and Beom-pal (Suk-ho Jun) realize that it wasn’t daylight that forced the zombies into hiding, but warmth. And guess what? Winter is here.
Luckily, the dead are still extremely water-averse, so at least our heroes have that going for them as they make their way to Cho Hak-ju’s (Seung-ryong Ryu) stronghold in Hanyang.
Hopefully that made sense. Kingdom is a massive story that seamlessly weaves its narrative between courtly intrigue, amazing period sets and costumes, and graphically violent and gory zombie carnage. Here’s a link to my coverage of Season One for last year’s Easter Zombie Movie Marathon if you want to refresh your memory about who everybody is and what the hell is going on.
Because Kingdom Season Two doesn’t give a shit if you’re not caught up. It doesn’t waste time reestablishing characters and relationships. Writer/creator Kim Eun-hee (he wrote the webcomic upon which the series is based) is treating this as one huge story, structuring the narrative with organic episode breaks that help to make the overall series feel like it is moving confidently toward completion, never meandering around finding its footing.