If the success of the movies Resident Evil and 28 Days Later in the early 2000s kickstarted a resurgence the zombie genre, then the record-breaking popularity of The Walking Dead in the following decade brought it straight into the mainstream. By 2016, it was hard for movies and shows to do anything new with the undead. The South Korean movie Train to Busan was a rare exception--this fast moving thriller didn't set out to reinvent the genre, but by giving it a great setting for its zombie mayhem (a high speed train), and by ensuring the characters and drama were as strong as the action and horror, it found huge worldwide success.

An animated Train to Busan prequel titled Seoul Station was also released in 2016, and now we have the follow-up movie. Peninsula is directed by Yeon Sang-ho once more, and while the film's setting is very much the world of the first movie, that's really the only link to the original. This is a standalone film, with a very different location, story, and collection of characters.

The plot is straightforward. In the four years since the zombie virus infected South Korea, the entire Korean peninsula has been annexed--no one gets in or out. An enterprising American gangster living in Hong Kong learns of a huge stash of US dollars trapped in a truck in the Korean city of Incheon, so he hires a team of assorted misfits to retrieve it from the peninsula. The team is led by former soldier Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won), who is tormented by the loss of his sister and her daughter years earlier, and inevitably things go wrong soon after the money is found.