An unscrupulous mayor hopes to build an amusement park on the site of the town's war memorial. But when the memorial is blown up to clear the site, soldiers seemingly killed in the Vietnam War rise up from beneath it, where they have been held in an inert state in a sealed capsule, after being affected by the Vietcong's biological weapon--essentially, vampirism. As local boy Jimmy and Japanese translator Yoshie struggle to solve the problem, Jimmy's deceased family members (and tribal elders) help him call the dead up to fight for the living.
As a mid-1980s Australian film, Zombie Brigade is relatively unusual in having non-white protagonists (the hero is Indigenous Australian and the heroine Japanese), for making race and racial intolerance explicit in the film, and for drawing on Indigenous Australian culture rather than European culture as the source of the magical solutions to problems.
