In an online post, the director/writer emphasized the film was made, he says, “Just for own audience,” or Tamil viewers who are comfortable with the style of physical and verbal comedy more common to slapstick comedies produced by the thriving film industry of Tamil Nadu in Southern India, sometimes referred to with the portmanteau “Kollywood.”
While Bhuvan Nullan R. has certainly met his goal of spoofing the genre, with at least one very specific visual reference to Shaun of the Dead and the 2016 blockbuster Tamil zombie-action film Miruthan, he apparently couldn’t stop himself from allowing the opening pre-titles sequence from being an offhand criticism of social, economic, and judicial inequalities that encourage environmental abuses and unregulated capitalism.
While Bhuvan Nullan R. has certainly met his goal of spoofing the genre, with at least one very specific visual reference to Shaun of the Dead and the 2016 blockbuster Tamil zombie-action film Miruthan, he apparently couldn’t stop himself from allowing the opening pre-titles sequence from being an offhand criticism of social, economic, and judicial inequalities that encourage environmental abuses and unregulated capitalism.
As with the 2016 internationally acclaimed South Korean film Train to Busan, zombie troubles fall off the back of a farmer’s truck, but the trail of origin usually leads back to an industrial accident.
In Bhuvan Nullan R.’s zomcom, it is a farmer who dumps a handful of dead chickens into a small pond, perhaps preferring to hide what might be a disease outbreak at his farm and avoid the government forcing a full cull of his flock.
The camera focus shifts to a man who has witnessed the illegal dumping. The man, perhaps an impoverished vagrant, collects the birds from the water. The trash-strewn pond is fed by two large concrete sewage pipes.
As the man gathers the carcasses into a bag, the camera shifts back into a long-distance aerial shot that reveals the pond water is connected to a large factory belching industrial strength smoke.
The bird’s eye view then cuts to a series of close-ups that show money changing hands, after which the chickens are shown being washed, plucked, and butchered.
The camera switches to a wider shot of the chicken cutlets being wheeled into a large restaurant kitchen by a cook who will deep fry them for the final service to the guests of a private resort where a party is being held.
The film title is then displayed in an animation that begins with an angry chicken’s eye that morphs into Tamil language letters that offer up a phonetic rendition of the English word “zombie.” An animated chicken leg bats away one part of the third letter and the full word is revealed before the title flips around to be replaced by an English-language title.
In both Tamil and English titles the characters/letters include “portions” of a face, including a wicked and toothy grin and an eye. Also included in both titles are a grasping arm to replace an empty space within a letter, a bandage wrapping, and a dash of stitches that demand reference to the iconic monster of James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein.
In the Tamil title, the final character is stylishly designed as a rooster’s comb, a trick that is lost in translation. (I wonder if Bhuvan Nullan R. is familiar with the 2006 splatstick Poultrygeist, an over-the-top farce whose stylized title was nowhere near as visually creative as his dual-language offering.)
I have to wonder why the designer of these creatively stylized titles chose to shape letters into stereotypical feminine images. In both languages, the radicals at the start and end of the word are abstracted into red high-heeled shoes. Another character (the English "i") is recognizably shaped as a lipstick container. Why this suggested feminization of the word “zombie?” It may be that the first victims of the film’s zombification are mostly women who eat the chicken at a barbecue hosted by the vacation resort. I do hope it is not in any way a suggestion that women are associated with both clucking hens or zombie outbreaks.
Indeed, one of the only truly disturbing aspects of Bhuvan Nullan R.’s film is the depiction of two men who see themselves as flirting with a woman they do not recognize is a zombie. These men also do not recognize they are behaving as sexual predators, displaying behavior that could only be identified as harassment and grossly disrespectful of both women and adult men. Surely some viewers will find comedy in this, but for any male viewer with an EQ above that of a delinquent adolescent, this will be the place where the zombie comedy becomes an embarrassing display of actual horror.
This entire sequence from the opening shots of the farmer’s truck to the animated title takes up almost six minutes, followed by almost two-and-a-half minutes of credits offered on a background of animated microbes, ever shifting and multiplying.
Overall, Zombie is a pleasant film built upon the comedy of cuteness available in the fat male body and the ordinary male face, and of course the charm of actors knowingly going too far in their characterizations of the clueless and powerless. I'll try to come back to this film again in future posts.
INTERVIEWS WITH BHUVAN NULLAN R.
No Heroes or Heroines in 'Zombie'
This Film Will Pave the Way
Cast and Director TV Appearance (in Tamil)
Official Zombie Trailer (no subtitles)
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