The Sadness (Ku bei)

 The Sadness is a new zombie (or more appropriately, a rage virus) Taiwanese movie. It's also a type of film I haven't seen in a while - a gorehound endurance test, an extreme-horror assault on good taste that riffs on George Romero's The Crazies, but focuses and revels in horrific violence to the exclusion of almost everything else.

 The story follows a young couple, Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu), who are separated and try to find each other in the midst of the outbreak of a pandemic that turns people into violent, rapey fast zombies. After some establishing scenes, the movie kicks into high gear when a morning commute turns bloody:

Mind the wet floors.

 It's a genuinely disturbing, well-made scene, especially in the opening stages, with a single, knife-wielding nutjob stabbing his way through a crowd. When it gets going, his movie does not fuck around, and set-pieces like these make it more than worthwhile.

 But... well, it doesn't get going for a while, and when it does it's a bit stop-start. While the part of the movie that focuses on Kat is a relentless, tense series of chases, it frequently cuts back to her boyfriend Jim, who spends most of the movie trying to track her down. The pacing feels a little off, with some episodic encounters that keep deflating the nervous energy the movie had managed to build up. The whole story develops much as you'd expect, with a few elements that have been done to undeath elsewhere in the zombie space.

 It also ends up being a bit shallow, despite flirting with commentary a couple of times. In that early subway scene, before it turns into a bloodbath, Kat is harassed by a creep (Tzu-Chiang Wang) who then acts like an entitled little shit when he's rebuffed; He gets infected and turned into a literal fucking monster that stalks her throughout the rest of the movie. Seriously, fuck that dude. He makes for an effective, hateable villain, but the movie seems to be a bit too much on his wavelength, which is unfortunate in a movie that reserves its most horrifying tortures for helpless women. To be clear, the movie is not team #rapezombie, but its dour tone makes it a bit harder to watch than I'd personally prefer.

 Contributing to that: the film also devotes some time to a few infected doing some anime-style shallow philosophizing on how good doing bad things feels. They never strike upon anything interesting, just juvenile word-wankery. It's like the makers of this movie were aware zombies are often used as metaphors, but didn't really have an interesting metaphor of their own.

 It's a very well-directed, well acted, and technically well-crafted movie; There's lots of bloody mayhem, and the gore is appropriately gruesome and excellently realized. A really promising start for writer/director Rob Jabbaz.