Versus Movie Review

Ryuhei Kitamura's cult classic Versus is a guilty pleasure full of entertainment value. The setup is beyond the pale of outrageous, confusing, and overblown: A portal to the underworld exists in a Japanese forest, where a shootout between mobsters and excaped convicts just so happens to go down. This results in much carnage but even more confusion as the dead suddenly spring back to life: The portal basically creates zombies out of the dead, and not just of those killed today but of all the dead guys the gangsters have dumped here over the years. This is an extremely convoluted way to get us into a series of gun- and swordfights, all shot with impressively overstyled arrogance.