ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
Survival of the deadest
Directed by Nick Lyon
Reviewed by Deep Red
From The Asylum, the studio that brought you mockbusters such as Snakes on a Train (2006), Invasion of the Pod People (2007) Paranormal Entity (2009) and The Amityville Haunting (2011) comes Zombie Apocalypse, not a mockbuster itself, just a zombie film.
Anyway, Ving Rhames is in it. He’s one of a group of survivors trying to reach the island of Catalina while trying to avoid all the zombies.
I’m going to struggle with reviewing this one as I actually really enjoyed it but recommending it is something completely different. I picked it up on Blu-ray for less than a fiver on Amazon. I wasn’t expecting, well, anything really, only that it would probably be awful. But it wasn’t awful. The special effects look fairly cheap I suppose, the CGI stuff especially, but there are plenty of them and, with a little bit of leniency from the audience possibly, I think they work a treat. I especially like the CGI effects used in the finale but they do look cheap, fun though. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I think the zombie makeup is brilliant and the post-apocalyptic environments are equally effective, for a low-budget film I should stress.
As for the characters themselves, I thought they were very good. Taryn Manning is engaging as Ramona, Gary Weeks is typically heroic as Mack and Ving Rhames is great as Henry. All the actors do well, I was interested in what they had to say, what they were doing, nobody pissed me off as they were all just, well, survivors, no stupid attempts at humour, just people surviving, battling zombies. Anya Monzikova as Sara is bloody hot.
Some of the zombies seem to be overacting a little which does stand out a bit too much in places but it isn’t a huge problem.
There’s not a lot of tension. It’s really just one encounter with zombies after the other, that’s pretty much the structure of the film, a fairly workmanlike plot. Among my favourite zombie films I count Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) which are far, far better films than this but at the same time I think it’s a competent little zombie film and I will watch it again more than once.
