Zombie for Sale

A drug company is experimenting on people and one of the subjects escapes. He reaches a small town. The Park family runs a petrol station there; they repair cars and cheat the customers when they can. The father sees the strange creature and is bitten. He does not die; on the contrary he feels better. The family has an idea: they will bring old people to be bitten and charge for it. A queue forms. Everyone in town wants to be young again. Then the first ones bitten start to change. Lee Min-jae directs; it is his first feature. Jung Jae-young, Kim Nam-gil, Uhm Ji-won and Lee Soo-kyung are in the cast. It is a South Korean production. The kind is zombie comedy; there are elements of horror but the film does not aim to frighten. The matter it treats is the collapse of a small town; there is no work there and the zombie becomes a source of income. The zombie is the calmest figure in it; the creature shows no violence and likes cabbage. The narrative uses the relations inside the family as its source of comedy. The film was taken as an unusual zombie picture on release in Korea; the shape of the genre is deliberately broken. In the last section the narrative turns into a classic zombie film and the register hardens. The visual language is bright and colourful; the town is deliberately shown as a fable. Its limit is rhythm; the narrative is loose, the middle sags, and the ending conventional. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean comedy and mixtures of genre. Who it is not for: it is loose, it does not frighten, and the ending is familiar.