Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
TRAIN TO BUSAN PRESENTS: PENINSULA
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On digital on Monday, Dvd/blu-ray on November 30 The rotting undead were surprisingly fresh in 2016’s Train To Busan, the South Korean horror that put an outbreak of athletic, myopic zombies on a high-speed bullet train. Yeon Sang-ho’s follow-up isn’t exactly stale but it does feel like it’s approaching its best-before date.
There’s a whiff of Escape From New York and a mild waft of Mad Max as we pick up the action four years after the initial outbreak. Now the entire Korean peninsula has been abandoned to the zombies, and survivors are living as refugees in Hong Kong.
Hard-up former officer Captain Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) is the Snake Plissken figure tasked with leading a crew to his homeland where he retrieves an abandoned lorry full of ill-gotten American dollars.
He then finds the zombies don’t quite rule the roost. Hordes of fast-moving undead pack the streets but pockets of survivors have managed to eke out a life in the ruins. It turns out some are friendlier than others.
An abandoned army unit is holed up in a shopping centre, where they have gone a bit Lord Of The Flies under the rule of a full-on psycho called Sergeant Hwang (Kim Min-jae).
When the soldiers hijack the truck, the good captain teams up with a friendly family to steal it back and claim passage on the boat back to Hong Kong.
It’s frantically paced and there are some thrilling staged car chases. But this is closer to a decent episode of The Walking Dead than the first-class original.