Zombie 108 (2012)

Following a viral outbreak in Taiwan, a woman and her daughter are forced along with a group of police officers and gangsters when a horde of zombies overruns the city and makes them have to rely on each other in order to survive the relentless and ravenous beings.This was a highly enjoyable and fun zombie effort. As is the case with so many zombie efforts, the fact that there's so much action in here is one of its main factors and generates the most amount of fun here. The first encounter in the supermarket after awakening from the accident is so much fun as the different encounters with the swarms feasting on the remains of patrons and finding herself being chased out of the store makes for a creepy start with the appropriately gory and bloodied bodies found in the aisles adding to the fun. The scenes of the SWAT team getting attacked by the gangsters in a blazing gunfight before finding the zombies drawn to the gunfire and attacking the two groups in a mass panic, while the shorter attacks featuring the reporter being chased away or the zombies appearing in the club where the tied-up victims are stuck together all give this one quite the fun, fast and frantic start. By focusing on the efforts of the team to not only battle the zombies in the streets and keeping the civilians safe, there's plenty of great battles and gunfights in a large part of the film showing everyone attempting to get away from the creatures which gives off some rather fun scenes in the streets showing the survivors running into the hordes and forcing them into extreme measures to take care and avoid them, the plethora of gunfights to emerge from the creatures getting in and the groups' escape attempt to get out of the bunker alive as there's a nice battle to get to the truck amid the zombies converging on them trying to load the victims inside while the hand-to-hand martial arts required to hold them off adds another layer to the fun action quotient of this one. Likewise, the finale where the few remaining participants are trying to stay alive in the bunker where the creatures have trapped them and force them to rather fun barricades to hold off the zombies as they try to make their escapes gives this a kind of frantic high-energy finale to make for a stellar finish to this one. Along with the rather strong violence throughout here and the great zombie make-up, there's a lot of fun to be had here with this one although there are a few minor problems. The biggest issue here is the fact that the films' diversions into the torture dungeon where the one man has the others tied up and goes on raping them doesn't really need to be there other than to interject some sleaze and dirtiness into the film which didn't need it. They serve no purpose and have no overall reason to be there so it has some real problems being here. The only other issue is the film tries to go for poignancy in nearly all the relationships between everyone here and the melodramatic tone is quite draining overall since very little of it registers after it's all said and done as everything is like that. Otherwise, there's not much else wrong here.Rated Unrated/R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Extreme Graphic Language, Full Nudity, Rape and children-in-jeopardy.

To begin, I am pretty surprised by the number of topless scenes in the film. Hmm, in my humble opinion it didn't go too well with the zombies film. The plot is shallow and lacked conviction. The zombies are turned in split seconds which is kind of fast, isn't it? The zombies make-up are sub standard. The speed the zombies are rotting, guess it wouldn't last a day; should see more skeletons instead.I watched it in theater and I feel I didn't get my $$ worth. Kinda low budget production film. Nevertheless, it's a good zombie start for Mandarin films. Hope it gets better on the next zombie film and no sequel please.Wait for DVD, I would recommend.

There have been an increasing number of cheesy, low budget zombie films made in recent years, such as THE ZOMBIE DIARIES and APOCALYPSE OF THE DEAD, films which offer their own minuscule-priced takes on the classics but often falling down due to the poor expertise of the crew members making them. ZOMBIE 108 is no different, and in its defence it attempts to rip off not just one genre but instead three distinct ones, with generally poor effects.Firstly, it's clear that somebody watched and enjoyed THE RAID before they made this, because half of the characters are SWAT team members whose long-running feud with some ugly gang members provides a backdrop to the zombie action. Then we have the zombies themselves, the usual bunch of shuffling, entrail-grabbing monsters, who always seem to appear in badly-edited montages. This effect may be utilised to hide the rubbish nature of the zombie makeup.Finally, if that wasn't enough, writer/director Joe Chien throws in a flesh-masked pervert who keeps a dungeon full of chained naked girls and uses zombies to power his own electricity generator! The Texas CHAINSAW influence is clear, but it means that, tonally, the movie is all over the place, ranging from the ridiculous to the repulsive. One moment we're sitting through another hackneyed zombie attack and the next we're watching this slobbering rapist having his way with a naked and nubile young woman. It's pretty nasty.Thankfully, the film is so poorly made that none of it means much, and even the sicker moments are amusing rather than disturbing. Joe Chien acts like an overactive child when directing, with his irritating jumpy editing and choice of death metal to irradiate the ears of sensitive viewers. The film is littered with amusing errors, like somebody turning into a zombie complete with decayed makeup in the space of two minutes, and more bad acting than you can shake a stick at. My favourite character is the black guy, a wannabe Parkour expert who does these little jumps over tables and the like in a bid to convince us of his athletic abilities; such moments are truly hilarious.The novelty factor is that this is Taiwan's first zombie movie, but unfortunately it lacks any cultural awareness or difference to the bog-standard low grade horror film from any country on this earth: people running around aimlessly and doing very little. It's a bore.

This is a movie that many people probably won't like for a variety of reasons. First, the movie I watched was filmed in Taiwan with English subtitles. Now, normally subtitles wouldn't necessarily be a problem for me. However, the pace of the movie was very fast and jumped from one subplot to another with several different characters. This caused some confusion for me at first but as the movie continued it started to make sense. Additionally, it has some graphic sexual violence which some people may find distasteful. Be that as it may, the film essentially starts off with headlines explaining a recent virus in a laboratory and then we hear a car crash. Inside the car is a man named "Frank" who has been killed in the accident and an attractive young woman named "Linda" (Yvonne Yao). Upon regaining consciousness, she realizes that her 3-year old daughter, "Chloe" is missing. So she walks into a deserted supermarket and encounters zombies. She manages to escape with her daughter and is picked up by a passing motorist (played by the director, Joe Chien) who turns out to be a pervert of the worst kind. From there the scenario abruptly changes to one where the cops are trying to seal off "District 108" and then to a nightclub where an obese gangster (played by Morris Rong) is indulging himself with cocaine and naked women. Since I don't want to divulge the entire story I'll just add that other than the sexual violence it wasn't that bad. Especially considering it was a low-budget production. It had plenty of action and that was good because it helped to conceal the below average acting of everyone (with the possible exception of Yvonne Yao). All in all then it was an interesting film that some "zombie enthusiasts" might want to check out one day.