Director: Duane Stinnett
Year: 2006
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: Last Rites
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
Traveling through Los Angeles, a group of gang-members ask a friend to make one last drug run before he can quit the gang business and go legit, but when the deal is interrupted by a rival gang they find a group of ravenous zombies created when a meteor landed nearby and try to get away from the zombies.
Review:
When it tries, this one does have some good points to it. One of the big ones to the film is that there's a lot of great action scenes in here. The encounters here provide some great parts, including the really nice scenes at the beginning when the plague begins. From the general confusion at what's going on, the chaos of the sting and the zombies coming together all at one time makes for some really nice action. From there, it gets in some bigger and better action, from the first few escape attempts that end up meeting the zombies face-to-face unexpectedly is quite nice. The ending is also really action-packed, including a couple of quite nicely done moments that come off as really surprising. It's also the most violent part of the film, packing in some more gore than the rest of the film, and these here aren't badly done.
The good gore gives it a greatly enjoyable aspect with as much as it provides. There's a big amount of bites that occur through the arms, a very brutal severing, numerous gunshots and a spectacular shot where a head is ripped open from the mouth, all done in nice close-up seeing every graphic view. Rounding out the gore is all the great bite wounds and gunshot wounds that accumulate throughout the film, from the beginning attacks to the last attacks, giving this one a nice healthy gore quotient to it. The pace here is relatively nice, keeping it moving forward at nice moments and making it feel exciting and never really dull. The last good moments come from the opening and closing moments dealing with the meteors, as the beginning is a rather effectively done scene that is handled well and comes off as an original method for getting things done. The ending is also rather nice as it ends on a rather humorous note and is handled well, considering what came before it. All in all, this one here is pretty nice and entertaining.
This here doesn't have a lot of problems with it. One of the main ones is that it's way too clichéd to really stick out of the crowd. The most obvious is a group of people who despise each other that have to try and put that aside in order to deal with a greater threat. However, this film sets that scenario up with gang-members who aren't exactly the types to put personal issues aside with their rivals for any reason, including a zombie plague, which is pretty much how the whole film breaks down. With both rival organizations cursing at each other, beefing with one another, and threatening one another for a majority of the picture, that's a major problem considering that you can only watch people pull guns and threaten serious violence against one another so many times before feeling like it's trapped in an endless loop. The other flaw is that the zombies don't really look that great. Most of them look really similar to most other zombie films, not really making a distinct impression one way or another. These here provide the film's only real flaws.
Overview: **1/2/5
With some really nice points and a couple of noticeable flaws, this one here is a watchable attempt at the genre as the positive ones win out in the end even with its negatives. Check it out if your fans of the urban horror flicks or just low-budget zombie films in general, while those who aren't really big fans of either won't have a whole lot of fun with it and should avoid this.
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