The premise: A virus infects Taipei, turning its denizens into the lurching, mindless monsters that we all know and love. A SWAT team oversees the evacuation in Ximending, and end up in a three-way scrum with local gangsters and the brain-eating mouth-breathers. Mixed up in it all is a parkour practitioner, a mom looking for her lost child, and a crazy scientist guy who makes Hannibal Lecter look like a good neighbor.
A certain level of callousness towards violence is par for the course in any self-respecting zombie flick, but the same can`t be said for gratuitous titillation. The latter element litters Zombie 108 with a sordid frequency, as if to distract the viewer from the shoddiness of the whole product. We don`t often complain about titillation, but the stuff depicted here comes across as highly depraved, and tasteless to boot. There`re topless women at a night club, women in cages, women being peed on; material like that doesn`t need a movie critic, rather than a Freudian psychoanalyst plumbing the director`s subconscious for signs of depravity.
To add insult to injury, Zombie 108 is a mess of paper-thin characters, with subplots that never amount to a good story before the poor folks get bitten and zombified. It`s as if director Joe Chien equates the intelligence of his audience with the average cerebral capacity of the undead shamblers onscreen. Marry that to some disconcertingly awkward cinematography, and the result is as incoherent as it is unwatchable.
We could go on about the hammy performances, the vaguely racist script or the incoherent ending, but it`d be like beating an (un)dead horseâ€