The Sadness (Ku bei)

 The Sadness is a new zombie (or more appropriately, a rage virus) Chinese movie. It's also a type of film I haven't seen in a while - a gorehound endurance test, a pretty juvenile attack 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 and Jim, 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 setpieces 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 pretty 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 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 death elsewhere in the zombie genre.

 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 who  then acts like an entitled little shit when he's rebuffed. He gets infected and turned into a literal fucking monster and stalks her throughout the rest of the movie. The guy 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, I don't think the movie is on team rapezombie, but the dour tone makes it a bit harder to watch than I'd personally like.

 Beyond that there's also a few infected doing some anime-style crappy philosophizing on how good doing bad things feels. It never really coheres into 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 anything to say through them.

 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. Hopefully the next one will have a better script and a bit more taste in its tastelessness.