In Hammer's 'The Plague of the Zombies' (1966) the local squire was resuscitating recently deceased Cornish villagers in 1860 to work in his tin mine, while the American writer William Seabrook claimed to have watched zombies in the late 20's working on plantations in Haiti. George Romero later parodied contemporary society in his 'Living Dead' trilogy, so it was only a matter of time - on screen at least - before 21st Century zombie farmers would eventually be supplying zombies (complete with instruction manuals) to do household chores for the affluent.Shot for the most part in grungy black & black minus the breathless pace that characterised SABU's earlier thrillers, 'Miss Zombie' - SABU's first horror film - is pretty evidently an allegory of the developed world's increasingly insatiable appetite for cheap imported labour, and the bullying and exploitation - including sexual - that goes with it. When Shara starts collecting knives we seem to be entering Jimmie Blacksmith territory and order eventually breaks down with consequences that should be sufficiently bloody to satisfy the gorehounds in the audience.

Note: Check me out as the "Asian Movie Enthusiast" on YouTube, where I review tons of Asian movies.This film by SABU takes place in a reality where zombie infections have many different stages and full-blown zombie transformations take years to complete. Zombies with a low virus count are used as household servants, since they are relatively harmless if fed properly. One such zombie woman is the focus of this story. Spectacularly shot in black-and-white and glacially paced, this is an art-house film that plays with genre expectations. The zombie is used as a protagonist that quickly earns the viewer's sympathy thru a referenced backstory as well as the fact that she is consistently harassed (and worse!) by humans. There's also an interesting family dynamic involving the little boy. The lead actress (Ayaka Komatsu) gives a very good silent performance. This is a sad film that is also disturbing on a psychological level. Scoring is minimal but effective. Impressive stuff.FYI, SABU is a very talented drama/comedy director who made some very good films early in his career - Postman Blues (1997), Drive (2002), Monday (2000), and Blessing Bell (2002) being the most notable examples - but he has become less reliable over the past decade. So this film was a bit of a surprise. Miss Zombie (2013) is his first horror film and it's arguably the best title in his filmography now.

Saw it last night at Fantasporto festival and positively surprised me. The black and white cinematography is wonderful, with very beautiful images and lights in spite of the action plays in only a few places during the entire movie. Being a movie with zombies, the make-up is also good. It's a movie with zombies but not a zombie movie in my opinion. It's a story that made us think about themes like love, marital relationships, rape, slavery, life and death. The duality between humans and zombies is also very interesting, once the zombies seem to gain human characteristics throughout the movie while humans became more like abusers and acquire other moral problems, turning zombies into victims. The pace of the movie is slow but right, with almost no dialog but where the sounds and minimalistic music plays the role of a story teller. You can even laugh a bit in a dozen of scenes. I recommend it for people open minded enough to see a story with zombies but with a very humanistic theme, and without the gore madness so typical of the living dead.

This film starts somewhere in Japan when a wealthy family buys a zombie to be their housemaid. They know it can be dangerous, so together with the user's manual there's also a gun in the "zombie's kit", in case of the zombie turns aggressive. But they were told that this particular zombie is peaceful because there're many kinds of zombies, it depends on the degree of their zombie infection… Does it sound bizarre?? Well, this movie is bizarre! But it's also interesting on the point it uses the zombie issue as a metaphor! It has nothing to do with any other zombie movie I have ever seen. It's almost a poetic zombie film! In fact zombies here have feelings and emotions and in the end we don't know who is human or who is zombie… The main idea is quite interesting but the movie is too slow paced and turns a bit boring at parts. The shot is entirely in black and white which increases the melancholy and the poetic feeling. I appreciated the concept but won't score it more than 5/10 because it's too slow paced!