Junk

Released by: Unearthed Films
Released on: April 29, 2003.
Director: Atsushi Muroga
Cast: Kaori Shimamura, Yuji Kisimoto, Nobuyuki Asano, Osamu Ebara
Year: 1999
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The Movie:

Directed by Atsushi Muroga, who helmed Score (a Japanese Reservoir Dogs knock off), Junk continues the trend he set with his earlier effort of adopting earlier films and giving them his own spin. Junk is very similar to Dawn of the Dead and about a million other zombie films that have come since, but it's still a fun, gory ride that has a lot to offer, despite it's lack of originality.

The story begins with a government experiment gone wrong that turns a bunch of corpses into malicious zombies. When a group of wannabe thieves hole up at the compound hoping to pawn their freshly stolen jewels to a gang of Yakuza, things go berserk and a lot of people get eaten and shot.

Seasoned horror movie fans will find a lot of familiar territory here, as Muroga blends elements used in Lucio Fulci's Zombie and Zombi 3, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, and of course, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead with a crime story that has a very Tarantino-esque flavor to it. And it works. Even though you might know where it's all going, it's still fun getting there. Gorehounds will also have plenty to love about the film, as there is no shortage of onscreen carnage happening every few minutes, and the effects on display are relatively convincing.

Muroga's solid direction pushes the film along at a fast pace, making it easy to keep your attention and the lead female zombie, who spends a good amount of time au natural, is quite eye pleasing and pretty effective in her role.
If you're looking for good, brainless, fun in your films, then Junk is an easy recommendation.

Video/Audio/Extras:

Much has been made about Unearthed not doing an anamorphic transfer on this release. For all the details on why this happened, click here to check out their website, but in a nutshell the proper elements just weren't made available to them. With that out of the way, the video presented here is clean with nice colors and is a vast improvement over the dark and grainy R2 release (which oddly enough was anamorphic). The reds are nice and bright during the gore scenes and there aren't any compression or edge enhancement issues to report.

With the exception of the burned in Japanese subtitles during the English dialogue scenes, there isn't much to complain about in the audio department. The Dolby Digital 2.0 track is in Japanese with removable English subtitles (except for the aforementioned scenes which are obviously English language) and the track sounds nice and clear with no distortion of level problems. Dialogue is clear and the mild surround effects add nicely to the atmosphere in the film.

While it's not exactly packed, Unearthed has dug up some nice bits to include on the disc. First up is a batch of trailers for Junk and other Unearthed releases, a photo gallery, production notes, cast and crew biographies, some pretty cool interactive menus and a nice reversible cover giving fans the choice between a gory cover and a not so gory cover.

The Final Word:

Despite the lack of anamorphic enhancement prohibited by less than ideal source elements, this is the best looking release of Junk currently on the market and the movie is certainly worth a look for zombie fans. Just make certain that you get the uncut version, as there has been an R rated version released for rental markets.