Operation Undead Review: Lifeless Zombie Action

In Kome Kongkiat Komesiri’s Operation Undead, two soldiers fight on opposite sides of a conflict between the military and zombies.

They just also happen to have an appetite for human flesh. And if they attack someone without killing them off, that person will turn into a Fumetsu too.

A notable difference from the usual zombie is that the Fumetsu can still, for the most part, think and act clearly. So when brother Mok is turned into one 15 minutes into the film, he doesn’t become just another mindless target dummy to be discarded by the story. Instead we open up a split narrative in which we follow both brothers on either side of the conflict. Mek is working with the military while Mok is working with the Fumetsu. It’s a unique idea that sets Operation Undead apart from other zombie movies.

Unfortunately, it might also be the cause of one of the film’s biggest problems. There’s way too much going on. A military conspiracy is afoot, an elite death squad is formed, and inhumane experiments are performed. The Fumetsu perform a coup within their own ranks; they split into factions, and they wonder how much of their humanity remains.

It’s also revealed that the Fumetsu can spontaneously combust; some of them will turn into dust seemingly out of nowhere, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers, and one has visions of ghostly apparitions from his past. Admittedly, that scene is one of the movie’s most stylistically audacious ones, but it’s completely out of place in the rest of the film. There are even more subplots with some of the villagers on the island, and somehow everything I’ve mentioned happens before we even reach the halfway point of this barely two-hour long movie.

It’s almost as if writer/director Kongkiat Khomsiri had enough ideas for at least three movies and decided to just throw them all into Operation Undead when making the film. We frantically jump from action to action with no time to breathe between. What should have been the emotional anchor of the film – the two brothers – gets lost in the shuffle. Still, the movie relies on heavy melodrama and overwrought, unearned emotional moments. They’re often accompanied by schmaltzy music, slow-motion crying and screaming, and happy memories in warm light. Which are really hammering in the emotional beats.

Another pretty major issue with Operation Undead is the calibre of visual effects. It’s not just that the quality of the CGI is lacking; it’s probably the result of a smaller budget. The film relies on them way too much. Smaller things like the recurring motif of a butterfly or a harpoon being fired are rendered fully digitally and don’t look real for even a second. The worst offender is, without question, the fire. Since that’s the weakness of the Fumetsu, there’s a lot of it in the film, and it’s always computer-generated. It looks awful.

Unfortunately, the practical effects don’t fare much better either. The basic Fumetsu zombie makeup is just some pale skin with black dots on it that are meant to represent mold. It admittedly helps to keep some of their humanity intact, but it fails to bring a more monstrous fantasy to life.

The actual gore effects are mostly fine by themselves – for example, when we see dead bodies or torn-off limbs – but when they’re wounds directly applied to a body, you can see a clear separation between the person’s skin and the sfx make up. Is this an issue so big it will ruin an entire movie? It doesn’t have to be. But when at least half of your cast is made of zombies, they should look better. If you can’t afford expensive effects work, try to find other ways of executing your vision. Don’t design your movie to be so reliant on them.

Operation Undead could have been just another generic action zombie b-movie, but its admirable ambition to be more is unfortunately its downfall. The screenplay has way too many ideas for its own good, and the effects can’t carry them out properly. If you were to reduce the scope a bit and trim some of the fat around the story of the two brothers at the core, you could’ve ended up with a rather unique and even emotionally affecting zombie story.

Operation Undead will be available on digital platforms on March 18, 2025, and on Blu-ray & DVD exclusively through Amazon’s Manufacture-on-Demand program on March 25. In the UK, the film had a theatrical release on October 9, 2024.