Ziam

Story: The world is on the brink of collapsing due to climate change. Food shortage has become a global crisis. Only Thailand, which has been cut off from the outside world for ten years, was able to solve the food problem through the efforts of entrepreneur Vasu (Johnny Anfone) and has therefore been able to maintain a reasonably stable society. Sing (Mark Prin Suparat) keeps his head above water in this world as a delivery driver, but because of the constant robberies this is a pretty dangerous job. In the past, however, he earned his living in underground fighting matches, so he knows how to defend himself. Only his girlfriend Rin (Nychaa Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich) is not happy with his dangerous job and asks him to quit. She herself works as a doctor in a hospital, where the entrepreneur's wife is also a patient and is in a coma. Vasu asks the doctor for permission to give his wife fish liver, as he thinks it could improve her condition. The fish comes from Vasu's own factory. What he doesn't know, though, is that one of his workers has already eaten one of those fish and is now fighting for his life in the hospital. In the end, the worker dies ... only to then immediately rise from the dead as a zombie. When the patient starts biting and infecting other people, panic breaks out in the hospital. The building gets sealed off by the military, but Sing still manages to sneak in. Still, rescuing his girlfriend with hallways full of zombies will be anything but easy ...

Review: "Ziam" is one of the biggest disappointments for me in a long time. Even though I can't say I had particularly high expectations of the flick or actually knew anything about it in advance. But my hope was to finally get a movie in which martial arts and zombies come together. After all, the zombie genre is so worn out that it needs new impulses. And at some point, it becomes unsatisfying to constantly watch how heroes run away in panic from hordes of zombies. When I saw the first trailer, I thought to myself that you couldn’t do much wrong here. A horror movie in which Muay Thai is used to slaughter your way through zombies could even work on a B-movie level and might even get more entertaining the “worse" it gets. Of course, something like "The Raid" but set in a hospital would be wonderful. However, "Ziam" shows on several levels how much you can screw things up. The action being particularly messy here.

Unfortunately, the first action scene against a few robbers leaves no doubt as to where the big problem with the action will be during this movie. Or more like "problems". Because the first issue is the way the scenes are edited. And yes, unfortunately we have another one of those movies in which we get cuts after every punch or kick in order to create the illusion of more speed. I have no idea if they wanted to disguise actor Mark Prin Suparat's shortcomings in Muay Thai, because apparently (and in fact) he was once a model, but after some quick research I was able to find out that he actually has a black belt in judo. So, he doesn't seem to be completely new to hand-to-hand combat and every now and then you can see that. Nevertheless, the choreography does not manage to work at an appropriate level either. Especially when you are fighting zombies, you could use completely different attacks and it would have been nice if you had seen a "regardless of the consequences attitude" in the fights, after all, you are battling the undead. Particularly hard action in the style of Tony Jaa, as we recently saw in "Striking Rescue", would have been nice.

Even if we completely disregard the fact that bones and everything else about the zombies could have been pulverized without any problems and we don't get to see any of it, the action still turns out unsatisfactory because of the shallow sound effects. The violence is also limited, so the producers probably wanted to get the movie rated for ages 16 and upwards. All this is very disappointing, because when it comes to atmosphere "Ziam" has a lot to offer. The hospital walls are smeared with blood, the zombies mostly turned out surprisingly well - kudos to the make-up department - and include a few original deformations, and the production costs feel quite high, apart from when you look at the CGI, which turns out terrible on some babies. Thanks to Netflix's deep pockets, the movie doesn't feel cheap at all, and especially the extremely sharp 4K images make a few scenes even look quite beautiful. But what good does that do if the basic structure is terrible? The story works entirely on a B-movie level and simply lacks likeable characters.

Let's start with the fact that we find ourselves in a more or less post-apocalyptic world. Climate change has made the world uninhabitable. However, it feels like the screenwriters only wanted to throw in a few keywords that are seemingly in vogue - although the topic is not really that in vogue anymore -, but Netflix is known for lagging behind a bit. So, the world has become greener as a result of climate change, shouldn't that mean that the CO2 fertilizer effect also ensured the crops to grow more? Maybe somewhat a little different crops because of the increased temperatures, but still? Or what exactly did they try to tell us here? No idea. Despite the green earth, Thailand is apparently a bone-dry desert, as the yellow camera tint also emphasizes, and the country feeds on insects. If you were looking for even more nonsense in the script, look no further. A security guard just stands around when a nurse is attacked until he is told to help, the hero is saved by a car explosion caused by who knows what, but leaves the hero without a scratch, and there are only 30 minutes left before a gigantic explosion reduces the hospital to rubble, yet within 15 minutes suddenly more happens than within the last three hours of the story.

Despite all that, the movie is worst when it tries to build up drama. The relationship between Sing and Rin is supposed to get fleshed out here, but it is so full of clichés that we don't really care. Likewise, Sing has no charisma at all, and it's hard to root for someone who leaves a woman who is mutating into a zombie in the newborn nursery, so that she can cause a slaughter there. In addition, there are constantly slow-motion sequences which are supposed to put focus on the drama, but nothing really happens here, the characters just dumbfoundedly look into the camera or simply stop dead in their tracks. The showdown is also really stupid, as is the epilogue, although there is a small scene in which Sing defends himself against a horde of zombies one last time. Here you could almost get the feeling that the action might even be somewhat close to good. But it is too little and, above all, much too late. "Ziam" doesn’t offer anything good in exactly those areas in which it could have set itself apart from other productions of the genre. Due to the complete oversaturation of the genre, having a few nice ideas for zombies simply isn’t enough to get anyone excited anymore. "Ziam" fails miserably and should therefore be avoided.

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