Having finished watching The Good Place and wanting something new to watch, me and my best friend decided to take a look at the South Korean zombie show All of Us Are Dead. This twelve episode series mainly takes place within the confines of a high school that had been the centre of a zombie outbreak and mainly features a cast of teenagers. It was so good that yesterday (at the time of writing) me and my friend spent seven hours watching through the final seven episodes. This is a heck of a good show.
After a student gets bitten by a hamster in the school's science lab, a chain of events unfold that lead to a citywide zombie outbreak. It turns out the science teacher had secretly been working on a virus that had been designed to give the weak a means to fight back against their oppressors. The injured student is taken to the city hospital, while back at the school, the school nurse who had tried to treat her, finds herself infected also, and pretty soon nearly the entirety of the school is full of flesh hungry undead. The students of one class form a group and together they try their best to survive against the relentless hordes, while trying to find a way to alert the outside world to their predicament. These characters include Lee Cheong-san (Chan-Young Yoon) and his best friend Nam On-jo (Park Ji-hu), calm and collected Lee Su-hyeok (Park Solomon), and the large yet kindly Yang Dae-su (Arvin Lee). Also at the school are a separate group of students also doing their best to survive, as well as the school psycho Yoon Gwi-nam (In-soo Yoo, one of the standout actors), who thinks the outbreak of the undead is the best thing to ever happen to him, and who has a personal grudge against Cheong.
Meanwhile, out in the city, you have a detective who discovers the source of the outbreak, and the firefighter father of Nam On-jo who is split between his desire to rescue his daughter and to help those who need his assistance in the here and now.
At roughly one hour an episode this was a season that packed so much into it. There are moments of downtime, yet each episode is full of thrilling and bloody conflicts against the undead. Being students, these characters aren't armed with weapons. For much of the show in fact, these teenagers use their brains and mobility to avoid their aggressors. The cast were so likeable and All of Us Are Dead is frequently laugh out loud funny. A perfect balance between horror and humour is present through at least two thirds of the show. This can even occur seamlessly in the same scene. Genuine horror and terror one moment, genuine comedy the next, was so impressive how well done this fine balance was. By the end of the season when the stakes have gotten higher a lot of his comedy falls by the wayside, but it is still present in the dialogue that characters say among themselves. This also falls into some of the side stories, the serious detective character in particular had a silly feel to his subplot, due to the comedy characters he kept encountering. One sequence took the form of a drone shot that had the detective and a cowardly cop running around the streets only to keep bumping into groups of zombies, the footage sped up to give it a 'Benny Hill' style comedy feel. These side stories were important for showing the overall picture outside of the school, with parts that take place within military command trying to contain the situation, and at the evacuation facility, giving more context to the outbreak.
The zombies are the real highlight here, there are just so many of them. At first they seem like a copy of the ones from Train to Busan. These are fast zombies whose bones are constantly making snapping noises. Here though, the zombies are very uncoordinated, they lunge at their victims, often missing and going flying into walls and through windows, they also are quite good at getting jammed in tight spaces due to the mass of uncoordinated limbs. This makes for so many really thrilling chase sequences.
There was also a different zombie type that made for some very interesting moments, with some victims discovering that they appear to be asymptotic to the virus, with the perks that brings. The amount of action sequences is crazy, and these are made up of such impressive visual choices. A girl standing on the roof of the school ready to jump looks down to see multiple zombies bursting out of the windows below where she is stood. Later, a man's attempt to stop the approaching zombies in a stairwell by blasting them with a water hose gets a neat exterior shot of his battle from some distance from the building he is in. Mixed in with all this are found footage type moments, such as the headcam footage of SWAT team members, or a vlog that someone is trying to make about the outbreak, and each episode (near enough) opens with footage from recordings the scientist made when he was trying to find a cure to the deadly virus he had made.
The highlight scene for me was the battle that took place in the school library between Cheong and Gwin-nam, the two students racing across stacks of bookcases while fighting, with the undead below sprinting around trying their best to grab them. Over the season I lost count of the times it seemed like the characters were in a siege type situation that looked legitimately hopeless, only for them to find a way out in the nick of time. Somehow this worked time and time again, sometimes even in the same episode. More than once I recall turning to my friend and saying "there is no way they could possibly get out of this!" only for that to somehow happen, in a way that rarely felt like a cheap solution. There are plenty of noble sacrifices made, with the majority of the characters combining into a group who were all prepared to give up their lives if it meant they could save their friends.
Twelve hours of just following the class of students around their school may have gotten a little stale, so I really appreciated the side stories. What I liked about these was that you never really knew how far along characters would get in their stories before they got swiftly ended. There were at least a few of these that end on a shockingly sudden end before any kind of resolution happens. That, along with a good death count even among the core cast kept me never sure of who was going to survive or not. I guess you could say some of these side stories could have been better developed. The main focus is always on the school, with probably around 25% of each episode going to these other characters. I had wondered how the momentum could be maintained of such high action for twelve one hour episodes. This just about manages it, with the final episode being the weakest, due to the fact that the story was all but wrapped up in episode eleven.
I loved my time with All of Us Are Dead, it was such a good show. A post-Covid world in which characters are aware of zombies in media (one even referencing Train to Busan) was refreshing enough in itself, but with a crazy amount of undead, endlessly inventive set pieces, and a near perfect balance of horror and humour made for something that was a real thrill ride to witness.
SCORE:
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