Director: Victor McGlothin
Year: 2016
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie
Plot:
After getting released from prison, a loser trying to go straight in life finds out that his friend has a special pest extermination business and joins in, but when he spurns an ex's advances he soon finds the neighborhood overrun by vicious zombies and must try to get out of the area alive.
Review:
This was a wholly underwhelming effort. One of the main issues here is the exceptionally overlong and unneeded setup that takes way too long to get going. There's very little interest here in what's going on for most of the first half here, running through the various series of his antics and conditions of being out on the streets, and the fact that there's so much him bouncing around to so many locations with so many people really starts this off on a bland note. We're introduced to him as a shiftless, lazy leech that only wants to do things the way easy and has no interest in doing anything other than the right thing which doesn't make us care about him at all and really makes it questionable why we don't want to see him get caught or why he's so desirable to the other women.
That also leads into the fact that there's so little horror here that this one doesn't really feel like a genre effort until well over an hour. The complete lack of action here, coming from us focusing on him running around the neighborhood trying to get one over on his parole officer by faking work, taking odd jobs or meeting up with friends while he complains about his working conditions that hardly anything really happens until the hour mark. This one takes its time to get to the outbreak by being so unconcerned with even giving any motivation for unleashing the zombies so that the frantic action and gore we get of them running around the hood dispatching the creatures seems all the more exciting.
Still, even that's another huge problem here in that so much of the horror scenes are so inept that it's comical more than scary. The fact that he still plays a bumbling fool who really has a hard time fending for himself such as the encounter near the garage where he's comically flailing away at the zombie or tripping over himself which simply shows him to be a bumbling buffoon at the time when we're not supposed to laugh. By focusing on the comedic aspects of this one during the time we're not getting any kind of reasoning why we should be fearful of the zombies, especially with the way the low-budget creeps into this one and ruins a lot of the zombie action as the silly-looking zombie makeup really undermines the attempts at scares. Even with the twist ending that undermines the whole effort and makes the zombie outbreak pointless anyway, the fact that none of this is competently planned makes for a troubling time here.
Overview: 1/2/5
There's so little to actually like with this one that it's one of the weakest entries in the style and really doesn't have much going for it in any regard. This is really only worthwhile for the hardest blaxploitation fans or zombie completist, while those looking for more of just about everything from the genre should avoid this one outright.
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