The first time I saw the trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I hated it. I was sitting alone in my apartment, streaming the trailer through YouTube on my television, and just about everything rubbed me the wrong way. The fight scenes. The self-serious tone. The “resolve as a woman” line issued by Lena Headey that rounds out the whole thing. Whatever dull thud of curiosity I may have had for the movie itself was deadened by a trailer that mashed together the flattest parts of British literary fiction with the worst tropes that the zombie genre has to offer.
The second time I saw the trailer, though, I had a grand old time. You see, people don’t seem to know that this movie exists. Moreover, people don’t seem to know that this book exists, that the film is an adaptation of a piece of tongue-in-cheek literature that attempts to send up both an extremely popular film and television subgenre as well as the literary works of Jane Austen. Every time I sat in a theater and listened to the people around me laugh and proclaim the death of Hollywood once the title card flashed across the screen, I found myself smiling. How can anything that that makes people harrumph this much be altogether bad?
Of course, it did get me thinking. Setting Jane Austen’s work aside for the moment, is it really so ridiculous to have a zombie movie set in a classical time period? We’ve been riding this post-apocalyptic high for over a decade now, and zombie movies have existed since nearly the beginning of Hollywood itself. Can’t we find examples of zombie movies from a variety of historical settings that might actually be worth the film stock they were printed on? So with that in mind, here are five zombie movies from the BC to the AD that demonstrate that the undead don’t always belong to the world of tomorrow.
Ancient China: Kung Fu Zombie (1981)
Whenever people write about oral tradition in the past tense, part of me always wonders if they should have spent more time listening to conversations in video stores. The people I know who celebrate movies like Kung Fu Zombie rarely write about the films in great detail; instead, they adopt their own kind of exploitation oral tradition, sharing stories of late night movie marathons while browsing at their local video store or waiting in their seats for a movie to start. This is probably the reason you’ve never read anything about Billy Chong. If you dig through internet archives and genre books, you can only find passing references to the actor’s reputation as a Jackie Chan imitator and his short filmography of movies in Hong Kong and Thailand. And yet, when Chong’s films do get mentioned—in niche video guides or as part of Tarantino film festivals, for example—they are treated matter-of-factly as some of the more fun films to emerge from decades of Asian exploitation.
In Kung Fu Zombie, Chong plays a young man who trains with his father in order to one day defend his village from their collective enemies. When one enemy in particular decides that the best way to deal with Chong is to dabble in black magic, Chong and his servant suddenly find themselves fighting both the living and the dead, including the spirit of one of his father’s oldest enemies. For genre film fans, Kung Fu Zombie is the complete package: eighty minutes of sped-up martial arts, gloriously awful English dubbing, and just enough brightly colored gore to keep the horror movie fans satisfied. Be sure to listen closely for an oh-so-illegal use of the James Bond theme song when the undead kung fu master is onscreen.
Biblical Times: Fist of Jesus (2012)
If I’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that I am incapable of understanding a character without a thoroughly detailed origin story. That’s why I’m so surprised that Hollywood has yet to tackle the challenge of bringing an adolescent Jesus Christ to the screen. I mean, I read the book. One minute he’s a kid, the next, bam, he’s a thirty-something with complete control of his heavenly powers. Where’s the trial-and-error, the montages of Jesus turning water into progressively better vintages of wine? Are we supposed to believe that he started with the good stuff? Wouldn’t there have been a period where he was only capable of mass-producing bottles of Yellow Tail? This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
Maybe that’s why I love the Spanish short film Fist of Jesus so much. Most of the film is a Peter Jackson-inspired romp involving Jesus Christ and his loyal sidekick Judas fighting centurion zombies; by the time the shit really hits the fan, Jesus has already mastered the art of turning a single fish into an endless supply of pescatarian throwing stars. But it’s Jesus’s slow mastery of his biggest power that makes the short so much fun. The zombie invasion of Galilee can be traced back to his first attempt to raise Lazarus from the dead, where—for all the prayer and piety the son of God has to offer—Lazarus comes back a little on the Pet Cemetery side. It is only later, when Jesus is called upon to bring Judas back to life, that he finds it in himself to do things right. All in all, a real hero’s journey that would make Fist of Jesus the ideal pick for a religious education class if there were any justice in the world. You can view the short film in its entirety on Vimeo here.
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