Director: Ben Howling, Yolandra Ramke
Year: 2018
Country: Australia
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
Traveling through the Australian outback, a man and his infant daughter try to escape from a zombie virus that has infected him and started a countdown to get her to safety, only to stumble upon a series of obstacles that prevent him from doing so and tries to finish the trip before time runs out.
Review:
This was a fine survivalist thriller if utterly abysmal zombie effort. The main element that works for this one is the antics of the group to survive out in the wilderness of the Australian outback. Living on a riverboat with their own set of rules and guidelines as they try to survive, this starts off really well in getting the rules of the situation revealed not only through their arguments but actions as well. As the rest of the film following the accident deals with the race to get to safety as well as trying to keep himself alive long enough to ensure that, the drama this builds during this section is decent enough and holds this one rather nicely. As well as the fine blood and gore presented here, that's all that's really enjoyable with this one.
Beyond this, though, as a general horror film, this was absolutely awful. The biggest issue here is that the way of trying to avoid turning into a ravenous isn't that interesting and just causes us to lose interest in the events that play out. There's no sense of avoiding what's coming upon him based on what we know is going to happen so his plight through the remote, desolate landscapes coming upon the weird characters as he goes on towards the inevitable all this time without revealing it to anyone else really just causes this to just wander around to one inevitable confrontation after another. All told, that manages to keep this moving along through a seemingly endless series of scenes and confrontations that just don't get interesting after a while.
Likewise, the other problem here is the lack of zombies or even action presented here. The zombies don't even make much of an appearance in their three sequences they pop up in totaling a grand mark of around a minute during that period, this this so bereft of zombie action that there's really no genre hallmark at all. The drama about trying to keep away is the overriding factor here, and the insistence on providing a human drama protagonist instead of a zombie-based one that really ends up stretching this out far longer than it needs to be keeping this at the forefront of the film rather than the zombie threat. In the end, this is just a dull, boring non-zombie effort.
Overview: */5
While this starts off on a nice survivalist bent, it all dissipates soon enough into a bland, overall barely-there zombie effort that's infinitely boring and problematic. Only look into this one if you're a hardcore completist of this type of film, while those looking for traditional balls-to-the-wall zombie action from start-to-finish should absolutely avoid this one.
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