I wrote previously about the announcement that Highschool of the Dead would be coming stateside and the lightning speed with which that announcement came. A free promotional episode has now been posted on Anime News Network’s video viewer, and the ZRC was able to conduct a screening and an in-depth review.

I’m actually shocked at how awful this is… and not just from a Zombie Rights perspective.

Details below a cut.

Ok, to start with, you have a small primary cast of characters introduced in the first episode: Takashi, Rei and Hisashi, who were a trio of friends from childhood, until Rei moved on from a childhood promise to ‘marry’ Takashi and started dating Hisashi. These are the three we’ll focus on during the initial outbreak.

The story jumps back and forth, because the director or author read that this was a sign of creativity. The episode begins with the three making their way to the very top of the roof of their school, with Hisashi clearly injured and ailing. Rei is almost caught on the stairs by a zombie, and the episode cuts back to earlier that day, where we’re introduced to Takashi, who is moping over the Rei situation. Eventually walking back to class he observes out the window as a strange man approaches the locked front gate of the school. When a gym teacher tries to scare the man off, he bites his arm, and within seconds the gym teacher dies, revives, attacks another teacher… and your usual Zombocalypse begins.

Yawn. If you want a precise classification, we’re talking Romero-style pathogenic zombies with Snyder-infection speed but overall slow-walking; a sort of hybrid of the various stereotype models.

Takashi immediately jumps to action, despite having viewed this scene from several hundred yards away and a couple stories above, which makes the viewer wonder: does he know this is a zombie apocalypse? If so, how? After all, in 90% of the zombie media, characters in a zombie media product are unaware of zombies. Otherwise they’d know the ‘rules’ and they wouldn’t make stupid mistakes the viewer could feel superior for having pre-knowledge of. Also, quite frankly, in most of your zombie apocalypse scenarios, advance knowledge of the rules precludes any realistic end of the world scenario. Traditional Romero zombies, for example, aren’t nearly as lethal as some actual plagues that humanity survived just fine; it takes gross stupidity and social disorder combined with poor planning to bring down Western Civilization, which I think was his ‘point’ with the initial trilogy of films.

Moving on…. Takashi repeatedly refuses to say why he knows this is an urgent situation, trying to command Rei to obey him and flee, and even going so far as to accost her when she proves reluctant. Hisashi tags along after a school intercom announcement makes clear that, yes, the apocalypse is nigh. The school breaks into utter pandemonium, students tramping students and the like, and the trio make, first for the administration wing of their school (to avoid their fellow students), then for the roof (in hope of eventual rescue).

On the way, Hisashi tries to demonstrate his black belt in martial arts to restrain a zombie that Rei unsuccessfully attempts to kill using an improvised spear (she’s in the ‘spear martial arts’ club, which just shows how much cooler school clubs are in Japan). That was a poor move on Hisashi’s part, as he is of course bitten.

Through his school uniform and no doubt a shirt underneath; oh, and the zombie breaks his own neck to get in position.

This brings me to a point that I’ve often pondered about zombie fiction: why is it that zombies have such terrific bite strength? Long sleeves and pant legs seem to pose no barrier to zombies in your average movie, but, leaving aside the extra zombie strength most undead seem to acquire, tooth enamel is only so dense, and teeth only so sharp. How can a zombie even bite through a skull? Could YOU bite through a skull?

So yeah, Hisashi’s doomed, because presumably, he didn’t know the rules either… only he and Takashi then reveal they both did, if I followed their confusing conversation properly. You see, to be cute, they refuse to call ‘zombies’ by that term, referring to the unfriendly undead as ‘Them’, and talk obliquely about their appearances in games and movies and… yeah.

So if Takashi knew the rules, why didn’t he just explain? Was he afraid of not being believed? And if Hisashi knew them, why did he leave himself so vulnerable?

Suffice it to say this sets up a vicious love triangle-suicide pact situation on the roof, which is the plot point that most reviewers who see this show positively choose to focus on, but is a fairly tired variation on what is by now a tired movie cliche, killing the Infected Loved One. Again, yawn. At least Romero tries variations from time to time.

All right, so if the show is a traditional zombie bashing tale, what else is there to hate? What not? The elephant in the room that I’ve avoided so far is that this show goes so far beyond tawdry it reaches new depths of sleaze. If you want to spend your next 20 minutes ogling animated high school girls’ underwear and frantically bouncing breasts interspersed with violent mayhem and gore, my friend, this show is for you. Seriously. If you had a drinking game where you took a swig every time you saw inappropriate high school panty by the end of this first episode you’d be in a coma.

Bonus points: the zombie apocalypse apparently caused every woman in Japan to skip wearing a bra that day.

*rolls eyes*

So, what else. It’s overproduced, full of flashy CG and gimmicky effects that distract you from what little story there is. The gore is routine and poorly done for a horror product, with no memorable death scenes. Tom Savini may be an anti-zombie bigot (though ally in the fight against cancer), but give the man his due, he’s a master of creative deaths on screen.

Nobody’s going to have nightmares from Highschool of the Dead if they’ve seen a single real zombie movie before, let alone played Resident Evil. Thus it really fails its first challenge as a horror product, which is to be, well, horrifying.

On all fronts this episode failed to deliver. No real scares, no innovation, and of course the awful, retrograde, Amos and Andy on steroids stereotyping of the Differently Animated.

0 out of 10, do not recommend, etc. Save yourself the time, pour some red food coloring on a naughty comic you print off from the net, call it a day.

Epic fail.

Tags: Anime or Manga, Romero, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 12:06 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.