It's a horror-comedy that didn't make me laugh, starring a hardcore porn star (Ai Haneda). She gets naked and has sex scenes, but fewer than I'd expected and this isn't a pink film. No, what's important here are the zombie and the fat Japanese Jason Vorhees. (The latter's name is Jason Yamada and he's not the real thing, but he still wears a hockey mask and he'll hack you to pieces with an axe if you have sex in his vicinity. He arrives pretty late in the film, though, which is mostly about our schoolgirl heroine and her zombie obsession.)

Hiromi (Ai Haneda) doesn't like boys with a pulse. She gets excited on finding that a classmate's called Zombie-kun, but unfortunately that's only because he doesn't react when three boys bully him. Well, never mind. His nickname's a good start. Hiromi only needs to murder him, then revive his corpse as her undead sex toy!

It's all pretty silly, starting with bad acting at a funeral when the deceased climbs out of his coffin. (That's the opening scene.) There's stupid attempted comedy when Hiromi reads a zombie book in French and then announces "I can't read French!" Her murder technique is to remove her knickers and dangle them over a lethal drop. Zombie-kun obediently reached for them far enough to let Hiromi push him over, despite being on a staircase with high stair rails that look extremely safe. Later, a misunderstanding will send those three bullies over the same stair rail. (The latter scene is silly not because it's physically implausible, but because of Hiromi and Zombie-kun's underreactions to three deaths. Mind you, Hiromi's also willing to become an axe murderer just to provide zombie food.)

Zombie-kun is the best thing in the film. The make-up artists go to town. He goes through rigor mortis, putrefaction, a maggot-ridden stage, etc. There are several different kinds of zombie in this film and they're all the same Zombie-kun, just at different stages of decay. (His intellect and voice also deteriorate. By the end, he's just moaning with subtitles.) At the same time, though, he's likeable. When the Hiromi-Zombie-Jason love triangle goes bad, he goes into the woods, digs a grave for himself and wonders if flowers will grow when his rotting corpse fertilises the ground.

Ai Haneda is fine. She's chirpy, silly and ghoulish. I was amused by her reaction to being dismembered, even if it only happened because she's an idiot.

The Friday the 13th series had been dead for about a decade by this point, incidentally, unless you count the 2009 remake. The last one had been Freddy vs. Jason in 2002.

This is a ridiculous film that didn't really make me laugh, but I don't dislike it. It's happy and daft. It commits to its bubbly, empty-headed pseudo-horror, including a finale that's silly but also true to how our heroes would react. Zombie-kun becomes a celebrity who endorses soft drinks with a song and dance number. I have a modest degree of fondness for our lovebirds, even though they're literally too dumb to live. It's harmless nonsense.