Oxford Film Festival 2021 Review: I. Fan Wang’s manic and creative GET THE HELL OUT delivers crazy zombie politics
Politics, at least in this country, is often compared to pro-wrestling, with its egomaniacal characters, hyperbolic good and evil bluster, and behind-the-scenes collaboration by corporate interests to predetermine the outcomes. Similarly, politicians often get compared to zombies: soulless, unthinking ghouls who suck regular people dry and are desperately in search of brains. So when a movie combines politics, zombies, and pro-wrestling, it’s simultaneously an inspired choice, and one so natural we probably should have seen it coming. And I. Fan Wang’s Get the Hell Out, which screened recently at the Oxford Film Festival, has even more reference points than this on its mind.
But just like in the craziness of a movie like Kill Bill Vol. 1, understanding every shout out is neither the point nor especially possible for the typical audience member. First-time feature director Wang loads his film with references to memes, vintage karaoke machines, fighting games, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, to name a few. Clad in candy-colored suits, his live-action cartoon legislators of Taiwan regularly turn to physical violence, and not just fisticuffs. Special finishing moves like the hurricanrana – that’s a flying head-scissors to those of you not up on lucha libre lingo – come into play, and on one particularly fateful day, biting. Because it turns out that a strain of mutant rabies has become unleashed.
This was, it turns out, precisely the outcome former legislator Hsiung Ying-ying (Megan Li) was hoping to prevent, having staked her political career on opposing a chemical plant that is, naturally, the source of the rabies. Her baldly corrupt opposition counterpart MP Li (Wang Chung-Huang) is entirely pro-chemical, and caught between the two is nose-bleeding nerd Yu-wei (Bruce Hung), a former security guard meant to be Ying-ying’s ringer after MP Li contrives to force her resignation. Yu-wei, however, gets easily confused, and thinks he’s supposed to obtain power in general rather than a single result; as such, he’s easily bribed and cajoled by the cutthroat capitalists who love polluting.
Before any of this can be worked out, however, almost everyone in parliament gets rabies. And it’s up to our three main characters, plus a handful of other survivors to…well, Get the Hell Out.
Genre fans can have a field day debating whether or not this counts as a zombie movie, since the rabid move fast and technically are not dead. Because they’re mindless, and spread the infection by biting people, this seems close enough for horseshoes. In a notable departure from the standard walking dead, however, it’s not so much a shot to the head that finishes them, but a slicing of the neck artery, hosing everyone in the vicinity down in crimson spew. And it doesn’t necessarily take something like a chainsaw to get the job done. A pair of nailclippers proves extremely versatile.
If that weren’t all crazy enough, Wang enhances the story with freeze-frames, drawn caricature inserts, video-game style power meters, and various other overlays and effects. Zombie movie or no, the social context common in films about hordes of lethal biters is here too. The rabid ultimately prove to have a surprising vulnerability, and the real enemy is the government that wants it. And since this isn’t a Hollywood production trying to pander to Beijing like Transformers 4, the mainland military definitely does not come to save the day.
A movie this manic could perhaps stand to have a tighter edit. In almost two hours, the time taken to establish the characters works, but once the blood gets gushing, streamlining the action to quickly get to the part where main cast members get picked off one by one should be of the essence. It feels like it wants to be Die Hard with zombies; it’s more like I Drink Your Blood with politics, or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World if Dead Alive-era Peter Jackson made it. Nothing wrong with that, but know what you’re getting. And for audiences who don’t know the ins and outs of Taiwan’s politics aside from conflicts with Beijing, many nuances are no doubt lost.
Still, even if it does have a couple moments that drag a bit, just use them as bathroom breaks. After all, you’re most likely going to want to be imbibing something while you take this all in.
