The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

For all of its flaws, I, Zombie: A Chronicle of Pain is interesting for the simple fact that it is a novel yet faithful take on the familiar zombie mythos. It’s a thinker of a zombie film about a man who tries to help a sick woman (zombie), gets bitten and descends into zombiedom. He chronicles his reluctant embrace of cannibalism as he is driven to murder people and eat their flesh in order to stave off the crippling effects of the zombie disease. His body disintegrates into a grotesque, oozing mess of living death shown in a painstaking close-up style reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. As a story told from the titular zombie’s point of view, it inverts the usual expectations. The horror here comes not from his victims trying to escape, but from the personal psychlogical and physiological trauma of literally falling apart in the painful transformation to zombiedom.

The gore is low budget and occasionally cheap looking but there are several ghastly moments, especially the infamous genital trauma (wang loss) during an ill-conceived masturbation session. It was a little too smart for its own good, which made it talky and glacially paced and the acting is barely competent. Don’t expect a lot of excitement, but the realistic approach — zombiism presented as a degenerative, fatal disease — and novel point of view make it worth a watch.