My Review of "Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead"

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a recent movie that popped up on Netflix. It looked innocent enough so I decided to give it a try. After watching it I found out it was based on a popular Japanese Manga and Anime. It definitely shows and it doesn't translate quite well in live action.

The movie starts out with our main character Akira running away from zombies. We then go back to investigate his last few years before the zombie pandemic. Prior to the pandemic he was a mild mannered entry level employee for a toxic employer. He had been conditioned to hate everything in life and become obedient. This is fairly important as it is foreshadowing what will happen later on in the movie.

There are a ton of heavy foreshadows early on in the movie. It's so heavy handed that we can sort of predict what will eventually happen later on in the movie. That's pretty unfortunate because I'd like a little unpredictability in a movie. Then again this is targeted at youth and young adults so I kind of understand the handholding throughout the movie.

Only after the zombie outbreak does Akira suddenly feel alive again. He's free from the shackles of the workplace as well as social norms. The whole thing is about him creating a bucket list of things to do before he becomes a zombie. He starts to tackle them one by one and realizes that this is how he'd prefer to live his life.

Along the way he is reunited with a long lost friend and a mysterious loner woman. The trio eventually hatch a plan to go to an aquarium to seek sanctuary. It's a fairly simple premise but it does feel like it would have been better spent as a long running series.

There is a bit of a disconnect as our heroes are conveniently safe to make noise and have fun together when there's a zombie apocalypse happening. They blatantly disregard some of their zombie rules in their fun like firing off huge fireworks not worrying that it may attract zombies. The zombies only attack them in convenient situations. It's almost like a video game at times.

Even worse are some of the weird and zany situations that bring this movie down to a B-movie level movie. The situations were so absurd that I burst out laughing at certain scenarios. I'm not sure if this was intentionally supposed to be funny or was inadvertently funny.

I have to admit that the concept is actually quite clever and there are certain elements of this movie that I thought were really well thought out. The only problem was the execution didn't translate quite that well in live action as it would in Anime.

This movie is very Japanese though. The kind mannered mannerisms of our main characters is endearing and charming. Akira in particular has an over optimistic viewpoint of life that you could only see in Animes. A lot of this movie will remind you of Anime. It's as if there were no liberties taken and it was a shot for shot movie to the anime. I can even see this even though I've never seen the anime.

Although I didn't totally hate it. I found that it had too many moments that would take me outside of the viewing experience. You have to shut your brain off to enjoy this but for me that was even difficult at times. Fans of Anime may find enjoyment in this movie though. It is kind of a cut and paste of that genre so they will feel very much at home.

Overall, I still had some fun with this movie but it was a bit of a mess. Some of the inadvertent laughs did truly have been feeling bad for laughing at the movie. I'm definitely not the demographic for this movie but those that are into Anime might really enjoy it. I unfortunately have to give this one a 5.5 out of 10. I couldn't truly recommend this to anyone.