Chuga-Chug! Here come the zombies!

Zombies overrunning a high-speed train, what more could you ask for.

Rabid half-corpses, cross-eyed and gurgling blood, chase the warm flesh of human survivors in a moving vehicle. The dead is after the living. Inhuman organism in hot pursuit of humanity. The soulless vs the struggle to save the soul, and so on. After decades of resurrection, after the lumbering, Vietnam War-era Night of the Living Dead to the fast-running Golems of 28 Days Late, zombies have become a permanent member of the universal pop-lore -- a global monster untied to any cinematic race and an American B-movie staple now crossing into an A-team Korean blockbuster. Here the Koreans have shown that they can cook a first-rate zombie saga as impressively as Samsung's riffs on Apple; in a reverse traffic, Hollywood and French studios are now competing to get the remake rights of this smash hit in South Korea.

Train to Busan looks and feels familiar, which is good because we waste little time in getting into the neck-chomping. A mysterious viral outbreak has spread a zombie epidemic -- no explanation is given, which is again very good since we don't have to endure another nonsensical pontification disguised as science. Cue in the human drama: A banker -- a "bloodsucker", get the pun? -- is escorting his young daughter to the port city of Busan when a passenger on his train gets infected and soon half of the well-dressed commuters are transformed into a frothing swarm of flesh-eating creatures. The father, who previously ignored his daughter because he was busy making money, now has to prove his worth as a parent and as a person.

The moral message is familiar: in a stampede of monsters, the scariest creature is the human. Sticking to the playbook of disaster movies, Train to Busan is about a group of people stuck together in an enclosed space and a life-and-death situation where their true selves are revealed. The train -- as in Titanic or in Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, which is superior in its metaphor and ambition -- is a microcosm of humanity at its best and worst: We have the selfish father looking for redemption, with his little daughter in tow; there's a burly, big-hearted husband trying to protect his frail pregnant wife (a film about death has to have a symbol about birth); there's a group of baseball-playing high-schoolers; there's a homeless man to remind us of the democratic nature of the zombie threat; and there's the "elite" class led by a transport tycoon who'll trample on the corpses of everyone to make sure he'll stay alive.

Then there's the croaking horde of zombies -- a perfect metaphor for the universality of death because Korean zombies, Japanese zombies, American zombies and Thai zombies look the same, at least in the movies. Here on the high-speed train hurtling through fallen cities, the creatures are locked in separate bogies after the survivors find out that despite their voracious appetite, the zombies don't know how to press open the door. One of the set pieces -- there are many -- is when some of the humans have to bolt from a station and hitch on a moving train, then battle their way through the zombie-infested carriages to join the rest of the survivors.

In short, Train to Busan sticks loyally to the genre convention and yet makes it slick. The film has been directed by Yeon Sang-ho, who made a splash from a 2011 brutal animation The King of Pigs, an intense look at high-school bullying and structural violence in Korean society. With this high-budget blockbuster, Yeon brings in a skilful staging of sudden, irrepressible savagery of this unnatural disaster (that's debatable anyway, since the virus came from an industrial factory). Yeon is deft in handling the interplay of space: the interior of the train compartments, the cramped toilet, the gaps between the seats. And while we still remember the stomach-churning swarms of zombies in the Brad Pitt-starring World War Z, this Korean film designs the visual to make the terror more personal: it's not a World War the Americans seem to love fighting, but a Korean civil war between the living and the dead, which is hairy enough.

The film's closest reference, however, is not any of George Romero's zombie romps. It's another Korean film, Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, in which the last survivors of humanity live on a futuristic train incessantly hurtling through the new Ice Age. In this highly conceptual thriller, the survivors -- Korean and Western including Chris Evans -- are divided into classes, and the conflict isn't between the dead and the living, but when the lower class at the back of the train stage a bloodied revolt against the ruling elite snug in the front (Ed Harris and Tilda Swinton also star). For pure adrenaline, Train to Busan will chuga-chug you all the way. But to see how some Korean film-makers are cooking up some of the most interesting works, Snowpiercer is your weekend viewing.