Ziam Certainly Does Punch Some Zombies in The Face

The zombie horror movie has, at this point, been fused with every other conceivable film genre and subgenre, so it almost goes without saying that there’s nothing 100% new under the sun when it comes to the walking dead. “Martial arts zombie movie,” for instance, is a crossover that goes back at least as far as 1981’s Hong Kong comedy Kung Fu Zombie, and also includes prominent entries such as Ryuhei Kitamura’s classic year 2001 stylistic fever dream Versus, or even wide release fare like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But still, there’s a streak of novelty remaining in a film that both takes the idea of its zombies seriously–the horror of the returned, living dead, with an insatiable demand for living flesh–and presents a solution as straightforward as “just punch and kick them until they fall over.” This is the oddball crevice that new Thai zombie action flick Ziam (newly premiered on Netflix in the U.S.) has crammed itself into, and the results are entertainingly lurid and absurd enough to kill 90 minutes. Can you ask much more from the “muay thai vs. zombies” conceit?
Well, yes, actually–I suppose you could ask for a bit more, because Ziam (the fusion of “zombie” and “Siam”) doesn’t reach or even aspire to the bone-cracking satisfaction of either muay thai classics like Ong-Bak, or modern zombie greats such as Train to Busan, which appears to be an obvious inspiration. One can actually imagine this movie being pitched as something like “Train to Busan meets The Raid,” but again, Ziam can’t boast the constant stakes-raising action and formidable adversaries of Indonesian action classic The Raid, or the empathetic supporting characters and impressive set pieces of the Japanese Train to Busan. What Ziam does have is mostly solid technical fundamentals, some decently choreographed action, a zest for bloodletting and some very odd zombies. And hey, that’s plenty for a night on the couch!
The setting of Ziam is a near future, mid-apocalyptic Thailand, set amid global famine produced by a climate crisis, wherein the totalitarian Thai government has staved off destruction through isolation and the development of tasty looking, insect-based nutrition bars, ‘a la Snowpiercer. Like so much classical zombie cinema before it, Ziam draws the expected parallel between the haves and have-nots in this society, making the point as unmissable as possible via a hilariously unsubtle cross-cutting sequence that flips back and forth between dirty peons scrounging for bugs and chortling fat cats and their hired goons enjoying impossible-to-source seafood delicacies. But ah, the fish will in fact be their undoing: Imported by a wealthy but desperate industrialist (the guy who created the insect bars) thanks to its supposed potential to somehow heal his ailing wife, the fish instead contains a pathogen that unleashes a rapidly spreading zombie plague within a local hospital. This hospital setting is our Nakatomi Tower, the playground for all the fists, feet, knees and elbows to connect with zombie skulls.
Who’s doing the smashing? That would be our leading man Singh (Mark Prin Suparat), a smuggler who makes a bare-bones living by escorting shipments of precious resources (in this case, tainted fish) to powerful clients while defending his cargo from roving, Road Warrior-style gangs with his overwhelming fighting prowess, as demonstrated in Ziam’s propulsive opening moments. In the city, he lives with girlfriend Rin (Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich), a doctor who happens to be on shift when the outbreak begins. What’s left to do but to fight, hand and claw, through the hordes of snarling and blood-drooling dead in order to save his lady love? Oh, and there’s a plucky kid in the mix as well–we learn next to nothing about Singh’s character in the film, but the fact that he’s willing to fight to protect an asthmatic child is clearly meant to convey his protagonist bonafides.