31 Nights of Halloween Horror - #Alive

 #Alive

98 mins.

Dir. Il Cho

2020/South Korea

Haven't had your fill of Pandemic movies yet?  Here is another new one from South Korea. While they handled Covid-19 well in real life, in the movies they have the most vicious infected people as we have learned with films like Train to Busan and now #Alive.

No explanation given, no explanation needed.  Virus breaks out, makes people uber-violent and want to eat you.  More or less zombies, without the rotting flesh part.  But they are certainly gruesome looking enough.  Country is in turmoil, people are going crazy being killed and eaten everywhere.  The main character is a gamer named Oh Joon-woo.  He is playing online video games and has no idea what is happening in the outside world until one of his gaming buddies asks if he is watching the news.  OJ turns it on, checks outside his apartment window and see the chaos that is happening.  Most of the film is OJ in his apartment, watching  the news, sleeping, eating the last of his food and consuming his dad's alcohol.  Eventually the water and internet are cut off after like day 20.  When OJ attempts to venture out of his apartment he soon finds the entire complex is overrun by the flesh hungry infected.  He is just about to do himself in and go the way of the gallows when a laser pointer comes through his window and points to stuff on his wall to spell out hello.

Deciding he wants to live, he befriends a girl his age across the parking lot in the apartment building adjacent to him.  She sends him some food, he does the same.  She determines that the 8th floor of his apartment building is safe and they should try and go up there.  In a harrowing escape she leaves her apartment, hacks her way to his and up to the 8th floor they go, only to find out she was wrong.  The 8th floor is infected as well, but luckily they are rescued by an older guy who has survived as well.  Or are they?  Sometimes the worst people out there as we have learned from the Walking Dead are not the infected at all, but the healthy.

#Alive is a somewhat retelling of a french movie from a few years ago called The Night Eats the World.  Somewhat the same premise, Night...  takes place in an apartment in Paris where a guy wakes up to the find himself in the middle of an epidemic where the dead have come back to life to attack the living.  The french film is more bleak and serious, while #Alive is more action packed and light hearted.  The zombies between the two are very different as well.  In the french film, the zombies can't see or make noise and only move by hearing sounds, where in the Korean film they are pretty much the same as those in Train to Busan.  #Alive is more of an entertaining film, but story development wise The Night Eats the World has more to say.  Check out #Alive on Netflix for your daily dose of pandemic zombie movies.