Johnny Z (2022) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Straiton
STARRING: Michael Merchant, Felix Cortes, Jason Delgado
RATED: UR/Region: O/1:85/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BDr)
AVAILABLE FROM Rising Sun Media
If you ever find yourself watching a movie and thinking, “You know what would make this better? A half-human, half-zombie who knows martial arts and is pissed off at the corporation that created him,” congratulations. You have just discovered Johnny Z.
Directed by Jonathan Straiton and co-written by SRS Cinema owner and filmmaker Ron Bonk, Johnny Z is exactly the sort of low-budget horror-action lunacy that knows it doesn’t need to reinvent cinema. It just needs to give us zombies, martial arts, blood, and a protagonist who looks like he’s having a really bad day.
Johnny himself is a pretty damn fun concept. He’s part human, part zombie, and apparently all attitude. After being created by an evil corporation, he ends up under the guidance of a martial arts master, because apparently the best treatment for zombie-related trauma is kung fu.
Honestly, I can’t argue with that logic.
The movie wastes little time establishing what kind of ride we’re on. There’s an evil corporation doing evil corporation things, zombies wandering around, people getting their asses kicked, and Johnny slowly becoming the weapon everyone probably should’ve realized they were creating before they started the whole experiment.
The martial arts action is one of the movie’s biggest selling points. It’s not exactly a $100 million Hollywood production, but there’s enough enthusiasm behind the fights to make them entertaining. Watching zombies get punched, kicked, stabbed, and generally treated like training equipment never gets old.
And thankfully, Johnny Z doesn’t take itself too seriously.
There’s a goofy charm running through the whole thing that makes the rough edges easier to overlook. This is clearly a movie made by people who love this sort of stuff, and that enthusiasm comes through. It’s got that classic “we’re going to make the movie we want to make whether anyone gave us enough money or not” spirit.
The low-budget nature does show itself from time to time. Some of the effects aren’t going to fool anyone into thinking George Romero suddenly returned from the dead to supervise production, and the pacing occasionally wanders. There are moments where you can practically see the budget being stretched across the screen.
But that’s also part of the fun.
This is the kind of movie where you don’t sit there wondering why everything doesn’t look more expensive. You sit back and appreciate the fact that somebody actually made a movie about a half-zombie kung-fu killing machine taking on an evil corporation.
And that’s something.
Jonathan Straiton keeps things moving with enough blood, action, and creature mayhem to keep genre fans entertained, while Ron Bonk’s involvement feels completely appropriate. If you’re familiar with the kind of films SRS Cinema champions, you already know roughly what you’re getting into: independent genre filmmaking that wears its love of exploitation cinema proudly.
Johnny Z isn’t going to make anyone forget the classics of zombie or martial arts cinema, but it isn’t trying to. It’s a scrappy, bloody, occasionally ridiculous mash-up that delivers exactly what the title promises.
Half zombie.
Half human.
All pissed off.
And apparently very well trained.
Extras
- Trailers
