Saturday, 21 October 2017

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)



I guess on the plus side, when you call your zombie apocalypse movie Zombie Apocalypse you are doing your prospective audience the service of providing advance notice of how creatively bankrupt your film is going to be.

So what we have here is your standard "flesh-eating undead destroy civilisation" type premise.  Six months after the collapse, three young people emerge from the isolated cabin where they've been hiding and go in search of other survivors.  What they find instead is zombies.  One of them is killed, and the other two look set to join him, when four strangers turn up and slaughter the undead in an orgy of badly choreographed melee and gunplay action.  Get used to seeing actors awkwardly swing swords and hammers at zombies that aren't actually on screen with them: it's a really cheap if thoroughly unconvincing way to stage a fight scene.

The six survivors join forces and set off toward Catalina, as the newcomers have heard that there is a safe zone on the island.  Along the way, they will naturally run into a bunch more undead.  Distractingly, the same recognisable extras will be used in a couple of scenes that are supposed to take place many miles apart.  It's that kind of movie.

It's also the kind of movie where they position one character as the audience surrogate / point of view character, set up what looks like the start of an arc for her, and then kind of shrug and forget about her in the last forty minutes when they introduce several new characters and suddenly promote some of the other survivors to more prominent roles.

Anyway, zombie "action" ensues for a while, and the film finally delivers some memorable if extremely random cheese in its last ten minutes, and then it ends.  That final, amusingly stupid scene can't redeem the ninety minutes that came before it, and they certainly aren't enough to make me give the film any kind of recommendation, but they do make me a little less bitter about the time I spent watching this when I could have been re-watching Mega-Python vs Gatoroid instead.

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