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, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
It’s the near future and global warming has fucked the planet. Food is scarce and ancient bacteria is being released from the melting ice caps. Thailand has been at the forefront of breeding insects for food and maintains order as a police state. It’s a bold and daring setup before we even get to the zombie outbreak of Ziam, and director Kulp Kaljareuk and a cadre of screenwriters have one more bold addition to the zombie genre: kickboxing!
Former Muay Thai fighter Singh (Mark Prin Suparat) wants to quit his dangerous job of bodyguarding vital supplies across the country and return to the relatively stable life of underground boxing (!?!). His girlfriend, Rin (Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich) is a doctor, working at the local hospital and also wants him to settle down, but without all the kicking and punching.
She’s out of luck, because the latest delivery that Singh made sure arrived on time (after beating the holy hell out of a group of hijackers) is a package of creepy angler fish that the powerful company VS Corporation hopes to be a game-changer that expands the nutritional potential beyond insects. After a fancy dinner party of rich weirdos, where the fish is sampled, it turns out that the fish is contaminated with an unknown pathogen. The boss is taken to the hospital where he dies, then reanimates and begins doing that zombie thing.
We quickly get a ticking clock scenario as the military orders a team of commandos to rescue Vasu (Johnny Anfone), the head of VS Corp. who is holed up in a secure level of the hospital with his terminally ill, comatose wife. Once he’s extracted the entire hospital is going to be blown up to halt the zombie apocalypse. In theory, anyway. We also have more child endangerment as Singh meets up with Buddy (Vayla Wanvayla Boonnithipaisit), the son of Rin’s friend Meena (Nawarat Nunthaphiromporn) who unfortunately has been bitten and is in charge of the neonatal ward. We don’t see the aftermath, but it is clear that there is some baby-chomping going on.
Director Kaljareuk promised Netflix Muay Thai battles with zombies and that no CGI was going to be used on the zombie makeup. The practical effects are spectacular, especially when the zombies begin mutating and developing angler fish-inspired mouths, and the action lives up to the hype. It’s refreshing to see somebody fighting zombies without guns or machetes but mostly just his fists, feet, elbows, and knees.
A lot of the reviews for Ziam (Thailand’s historical name, Siam, but with a Z) knock it for not bringing anything new to the party beyond the kickboxing, but dammit, gang, the kickboxing is awesome, the effects are awesome, and we have a setup for a potential sequel that should see Singh kicking and punching his way across a zombified city/countryside to reunite with Rin and Buddy (who escape with the military while Singh “sacrifices” himself to hold back the zombie horde while they make their way to the chopper).
I’ll watch that.
Or the inevitable American remake with Jason Statham. C’mon Netflix! That’s just like printing money!