Everybody Got Their Something

DVD available now at Poker Industries

Everyone likes bad movies. Everyone, even if they don't know it. Recite a list of your favorite films to someone without lying, and eventually an argument will surface as someone tries to sell you on the merits of a movie so cheesy prolonged exposure to it could block human bowels. And yet, they'll defend their pet film to the death - perhaps out of sheer stubbornness to admit the flick was awful, or because they like it so much they identify with it; thus slandering what they like can be perceived as a personal attack.

After all, one person's genius is another's pretentious posturing; witness how quickly people divide to take arms for or against summer blockbusters whether they lived up to their own word of mouth or not. While most would have you believe that box office receipts are the true measure of a movie, hype is the yardstick by which you can measure a film's success or suckiness. As the hook that packs cinema houses with 1000 corpses ready to watch the dead powerwalk the earth 28 days later, the film's prescence in press or personal opinion will watermark whether it lived up to, beyond, or sank below expectations.

Eat me. Please?

In that case, how could anyone possibly expect anything out of Junk? If truth in advertising is to be believed, who'd watch it (well, besides me)? Then again, if movies were named for their content, then S.W.A.T would've lost their entire audience for being rechristned C.R.A.P., a film so by the numbers the characters were probably barcodes in the script. Thankfully Junk's, well…junk, is that of a very nude, very dead woman.

DNXstacy
This is the test subject of a stereotypical resident evil genius conducting experiments on a silent hill. Using a formula called DNX [your rap joke goes here], the scientist manages to bring his living dead girl from the grave 2 tha cradle. Her first word? "Yum", as she makes a snack of the necrophiliac by going down on his head for the brains inside. The military, which should honestly know better than to finance things like this if they're ever going to catch Hussein, finds out and calls in the scientist's protégé to help shut down the mad doctor's facility before it's overrun with non-running zombies.

Meanwhile, across town, 5 thieves nearly bungle a jewel heist, but manage to escape to meet their yakuza dealer, who's set up an exchange near a plot point…err, the same abandoned warehouse with a naked dead girl and her legions of undead are knocking about. Anyone who's seen a moving picture can tell you these parallel stories are about to get related very quickly and bloodily.

Coffin Dodgers

"Just a little to the left - ahh, that's the spot."

Director Atsushi Muroga describes his method as 'borrowing chaos' to make a 'serious foolish movie', filching from so many zombie contemporaries that his Frankensteinian creation is a breed of its own. While certainly staid, it proves that Japanese filmmakers know other ways to spell plot besides WTF. In this day and age where films either wink so hard at their audiences it becomes a facial tick or play it so straight it can't even take a joke, let alone make one; Junk has one hell of a poker face. With people who can't act in either English or Japanese, one seriously can't tell if the movie is meant to be homage or parody.

Of course, the living aren't the stars of this film. The zombies, aside from looking and acting the part of rotting cannibals; tear into their roles and the other cast members with gory gusto. By far, the most memorable deadite in the movie, if not in zombie film history, is the previously mentioned girl. After stumbling around with her fundeadbags exposed for half the film , she reveals herself to be not only the only zombie with some shame, but some fashion sense, donning a platinum blonde wig and a leather stripper's costume lying around the lab. Apparently the scientist had even weirder habits than were hinted at earlier. Somehow she not only becomes twice as hard to rekill as her brethren, but has enough of her own brains left to form short phrases and long kung fu combos, going Charlie's Hell's Angels on the fleeing thief main characters.

Never has 'aww!' turned into 'AAUUGH!" so quickly.

While any of the girl zombie's scenes would suffice, the best image summarizing Junk would be a scene nearly an hour in - when zombies come stumbling out of a certain room, for a brief moment the words PISS IN HERE are clearly spraypainted on a neighboring wall. It elicits a feeling of comedic confusion from the proper viewer, wondering was that supposed to be there? And so, by no stretch of anyone's imagination could this be called a good movie, but for the right people, it can be a damn good time. After all, one man's kick in the Junk may be another man's treasure.

On the web: Junk DVD
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