Saori HayamiTatsuhisa SuzukiMiyuki Sawashiromummies
Calamity of a Zombie Girl
Also known as: Aru Zombie Shoujo no Sainan
Medium: film
Year: 2018
Director: Hideaki Iwami
Writer: Kenichi Kanemaki
Original creator: Ryo Ikehata
Actor: M.A.O, Miyuki Sawashiro, Mugihito, Ryoko Shiraishi, Saori Hayami, Takahiro Miwa, Tatsuhisa Suzuki, Tomokazu Sugita, Yui Ogura, Yurika Kubo
Keywords: mummies, zombies, horror, anime, boobs
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Format: 80 minutes
Url: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=20835
Website category: Anime 2018
Review date: 1 April 2020
It's better than everyone says, but only from certain points of view. The first fifteen minutes are boring and badly animated. The characters are uninteresting and badly written. Five unlikeable college students break into somewhere and steal stuff from mummies, in a bland rehash of over-familiar horror tropes.
Assuming I'd started watching a bad Chinese episode of something, I was about to abandon ship when I noticed that the running time wasn't twenty minutes.
The film then got much, much better. (In other words, it became entertaining.) The secret is that you're not meant to care about those students. They're doomed. You'll be cracking a beer to enjoy their flamboyant, bloody deaths (which are indeed highlights of the film).
The film's actual heroes are those two mummies/zombies, who soon revive and assume human-looking forms. It's like a slasher film from the slasher's perspective. Euphrosyne Studion is the super-strong one who can pulverise someone's head unintentionally and then give a girly squeal and say "Whoops!" I loved her. She's an airhead. She's brilliant. Put your arm around her shoulder and she'll react like a blushing, innocent maiden... and also reflexively pull your arm off at the shoulder. Her inappropriate response to this made me laugh.
Euphrosyne's younger companion is Alma V, a maid, who has a much weaker body but stranger magical powers.
These two are great. Ignore the students. They're still present and doing stuff, but assuming that they're the heroes of the film will just annoy you. (One of them tries to extort sexual favours from another, for instance, although admittedly we're meant to despise him.) Their role is to get killed in comedically splattery ways, sometimes after trusting untrustworthy people.
(I'm thinking of the film's villains, who at one point do an "experiment" with their pet dog and a sledgehammer.)
There's a fair bit of nudity with nipples, but it tends to be on, say, headless bodies or someone who's being explosively beaten to death.
Euphrosyne and Alma are the only characters of any interest in this film, but they're enough. I love their politeness while doing slasher film stalk-and-kill stuff, for instance. ("I'm terribly sorry," says Alma, bowing. "I'll return on another occasion.") Some of the script's indefensible, though. Someone who's had their arm torn off can run around and talk normally, as if losing an arm is merely a scratch and there's no need to worry about arteries. Gluing someone's head back on, though, is funny. (It's magical. She's an immortal zombie. It's not meant to make medical sense.)
Oh, and there's also throwaway implied incest.
Is this a good film? Nope. Am I the only person in the world who enjoyed it? Based on my limited googling, quite possibly, but I think some of those critics are mistaking comedy for stupidity. (See also the severed head in the basketball hoop.) Did I have a blast? You bet.
If nothing else, you'll see a Death By Toilet.