It's a ridiculous zombie comedy. Lots of gore, but you can't take it seriously. You won't believe for a moment that a desktop electric fan could gouge out someone's guts like that, for instance, and you'd need to be Hercules to bisect a human skull like that with scissors. The way to destroy video tapes is to punch the television. And so on.

I laughed, though. The film's certainly original.

Aiko and Hashimoto work in a video production company. Aiko has been ordered to find a client's old wedding films... and this is 2011, so it's going to take her days to go through all the unlabelled VHS tapes in the cupboard. (The moral of the story: label your stuff.) Meanwhile, Hashimoto is a horror fan who can't connect with people except by trying to lend them zombie films. (Aiko doesn't like horror.)

Aiko finds a Zombie Survival Guide that appears to show what's happening outside right now, even though it was shot in the 1970s. (To avoid confusion, I'll avoid saying "film" and instead say whether I'm talking about Zomvideo itself or this Survival Guide.) Zomvideo does nothing with this time-travelling footage idea and indeed doesn't even seem to have noticed the potential. Or maybe we're just not meant to think about it. It's a shame. That's the most intriguing idea in the movie, but it's never explored. Anyway, the Survival Guide was commissioned forty years ago by the government, after a zombie outbreak that was suppressed by the military so successfully that Hashimoto thinks zombies are fictional and Aiko doesn't even know what they are.

Again, I didn't believe this for a moment.

Aiko and Hashimoto are quite fun, though, as is their camp gay boss. The Survival Guide itself is a chirpy wink to genre conventions, with all kinds of recommendations on how to survive a zombie attack. Aiko follows its guidance.

There's a pair of sentient zombies... maybe, perhaps. One of them insists that she isn't one, mostly, if she's careful and eats the right substitute foods. She thinks the living treat her kind appallingly and she wants the video because, um, reasons. (She's not a model of rationality.) "That atrocity is a record of how we've been oppressed and exploited!"

Also, a Zomvideo zombie's hair will stand up in a spike. That was weird, although the previous year's Helldriver did something similar with forehead antlers.

There's a wacky ending with a video that may or may not cure the zombie virus. (Hashimoto voices genre-aware doubts.) There's bravura work on prosthetic and visual effects. The cast includes members of an idol unit called C-ute, but fortunately they're up to the acting requirements. Underneath the light-hearted tone, the film has some surprisingly interesting takes on "I am not a zombie". There's a cool title that unfortunately doesn't translate. (Japanese has simpler vowels and says "B" instead of "V", so "zombie" and "video" have an overlapping syllable and the title's quite clever. In English, it doesn't work that way.)

This isn't a laugh-a-minute comedy, but it's fun. I could believe in it, mostly, ish. It's full of ideas and things I hadn't seen before. You could definitely do worse.