Director: Tudley James
Year: 2017
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
Hanging out in their small-town, a group of friends wake up one morning to find the elderly residents in the area have become infected with a zombie virus that turns them into savage killers and must rally their group together to stave off the killer hordes before it overruns the town.
Review:
This was an overall disappointing effort. One of the few bright spots to be featured here is the fact that there's a near nonstop pace with this one essentially being all action from the start. The zombie threat is basically unleashed from the very beginning and doesn't let-up at all, giving this one a series of action scenes to keep itself fun in that regard as the need for battling the series of zombie attacks from the beginning is rather fun. There's numerous fun encounters out along the town as well as inside the house which showcase some rather fun moments trying to get the upper-hand against the zombies as they continuously try to sneak into the house or chase them down in the streets around town, while the scenes of them out attacking other citizens that they see through the binoculars makes for a nice enhancement to these types of sequences. That these lead into rather fun gore effects with all the impalements and wounds being shown inflicted by the zombies makes these scenes all the more enjoyable due to the creative kills featured due to the nonstop battles. As well, the other big element is the rather nice-looking zombie makeup which alternates between the ravenous demon or bloodied distorted features.
While these hold it up, there are a few problems with this one. Among it's biggest problems is that the tone shifts so rapidly throughout here it's at times impossible to know what type of film it wants to be. The setup here, with the wisecracking lead and the bizarre behavior he exhibits point to this one attempting to be a comedy of sorts which is completely against the serious tone exhibited by the attacks. None of the sequences are really that funny and it's such a disappointing affair that this can't capitalize on it's setup as this one seems rife for comedy as ideas like him trying to call his friends on the phone while they're trying to fend on an attacking being or seeing the police officers responding to the distress calls really could've been funny. Instead, they come off as completely dull and mishandled by the lackluster direction of the film much like the serious scenes which are also quite problematic. From shaking camera-work to out-of-focus moments and ludicrous action scenes of the zombies attempting to shuffle towards their victims, these here are laughably bad and really do a disservice to the film without a whole lot of enjoyable moments.
This is also due to the central premise which is stretched out to absurd lengths in order to pad it's running time as there's a lot of unneeded moments added to enhance this one that include extremely shoddy scenes of observing the situation from binoculars or just using lame slow-motion photography to make things go longer when it really shouldn't since the main storyline here is so flimsy. It also has the undesired secondary effect of making the action completely unremarkable and unworthwhile for the most part, rendering a lot of the encounters into a dull, dreary experience the robs this of a lot of the intended horror elements it could've had. The last big flaw here is no real reason for the apocalypse that's mentioned here from a supernatural to a virus and nothing really makes sense due to neither one really being explained. These here are what hold this one back.
Overview: */5
With very little of any interest in here and only a few enjoyable elements, there's not much to recommend with this one beyond being an ordinary entry in the genre. Only those into this kind of setup or the most forgiving zombie completionist, while those looking for something more profound or impactful should definitely leave this one.
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