Director: Casey Tebo
Year: 2021
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Zombie; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Preparing for a Black Friday sale, the workers at a toy store find their sales halted when the customers turn into a series of ravenous, brain-eating zombies transformed by an alien parasite that arrived on a surprise meteor shower and must secure the store before falling to the creatures.
Review:
While there’s a lot to like, this one also has a bit of a disappointing air to it. When this one comes off the best is the general setup of the alien parasite arriving at the store and taking over the customers the way they do. Taking the metaphor to its literal conclusion of a swarm of zombie-like inhabitants that crawl over the store taking everything they can get their hands on, the change-over that takes place once it’s revealed that the creatures are being directed towards an ulterior motive being in the store and creating the giant blog-like mass that permeates inside the store throughout the film. This kind of structure is quite appealing and impressive which has a rather fun reveal as well as attached to it that makes this one somewhat intriguing.
Alongside the setup, the films' best aspects are its zombie attacks and make-up effects. When the zombies attack others and rip them apart, this one has a lot of fun with the swarm overtaking the store, filling out the aisles, and grabbing onto whatever they can dragging them away in a massive blood pool to emerge from the attack. With the series of attacks trying to get away leading to some decent confrontations in the storage room, an escape from the back of a supply truck, and the finale out in the store parking lot all generating some excitement, the action here is overall all right enough that there are some positives. As well as the great zombie effects for the creatures and the gore present, this has some great points about it.
There are some problems to be had with this one. The main feature that holds this back is the treatment of the zombies here that tends to place them on a different style of behavior than most others out there in the genre. With the revelation that they’re not directly attacking the group stuck in the store but more indirectly attacking them only as a means of believing that the store-workers are interfering with their single-minded goal of building the strange device at the heart of their plans. This means that the film takes them off the hunt for large portions of the running time to the point where had the group not ventured out of hiding nothing would’ve happened and removes a lot of the tension from this one considerably.
That also ties into the other big drawback here in that there’s a lot of downtime detailing the characters and their relationships which aren’t necessary and stop the momentum of the film cold. With the big sequence that has the group sitting around the circle sharing a meal and telling stories about how they came to work at the store, the character-building that occurs at this point here comes at the detriment of the action as there’s not a lot to like about how dragged out and underwhelming it all is at this point. As well, there’s also how much it changes the characters due to injecting the type of unwarranted drama which attempts to make them relatable but doesn’t do that, causing this one to be much lower than what it is.
Overview: **.5/5
Despite some intriguing elements here and there, the fact that so much of this one ends up as wasted potential causes this to slip down the list quite heavily when so many others out there deserve to be spotlighted more. Really only see this if you’re a hardcore devotee of the creative crew or the most ardent supporter of horror/comedies, while most others should tread lightly here before indulging this one.
Comments
Post a Comment