Zombie Night - review

2013 (USA)

2014 Anchor Bay Entertainment Blu-ray R(B/2)

Contains mild spoilers.

I'm sorry. I'm part of the problem.

Derivative direct to DVD / TV cash-ins like this only exist because of the great number of idiots willing to hand over money for literally anything new that has the z-word on the cover, and I did. I do console myself somewhat in the hope I'm providing a kind of buffering service, and my sacrifice may help others avoid the same cinematic misfortune. If just one person recalls the roasting I'm just about to give this latest The Aslylum snore-fest and returns it to the Walmart shelf with nothing more than a cursory glance then maybe my +1 sale will be justified and I can forgive myself.

If you've not yet gathered, I'm not a fan of director John Gulager's (Feast / Piranha 3DD) weary pointless zombie endeavour, though I am amazed they got name-recognisable actors Anthony Michael Hall (Patrick) and Daryl Hannah (Birdy) on board; though let's be honest it's been a long time since these guys and girls were particularly relevant. Also in all honesty they don't do that bad job given the horrendous script they have to work with; though here we are one day after watching it and I'm already struggling to recall much of what they said or did. And this is Zombie Nights biggest problem. Nothing really happens. 

Looking at its Wikipedia stub, the plot in its entirety is described thus: "Two families must survive a zombie attack." That's your lot, seven words summing it all up, but here's the rub, even that I feel exaggerates all that's on offer.

Predictably it's z-day one for the traditional end of the world undead apocalypse. People are confused, people are scared, people die and even the brightest people are suddenly compelled to do really, really stupid things guaranteed to get them into trouble. Patrick, daughter Tracie (Rachel G. Fox) and a fodder friend are in a car, Tracie's mum, Birdy and grandma (Shirley Jones) are at home, their next door neighbour and all round douche, Joseph (Alan Ruck) and family are at home thinking about hiding away in their well-stocked safe room and the story flitters between the groups as they try and survive till morning when the zombies will all drop dead (again).

Contrived nonsense best describes how it all unfolds. Safe rooms with one zombie in and basements are given up in favour of graveyards and greenhouses. In all honesty the first five minutes will tell you enough. Tracie gets a text from her boyfriend (Joseph's son) that bad stuff may be going down, so Patrick decides to get off the free-way to make it back home via a short cut next to the cemetery. Fiddling with his own phone he hits someone and they all get out to investigate. With Tracie and Patrick studying two severed legs some eight foot from the car, two hands shoot out from under the boot (trunk) and grab said ensign expendable. Ok, nothing too bad so far. But with no sense of continuity, coherence or respect for the viewer we're then subjected to an awful borderline comical CG legless hover zombie pulling himself on to her, and more worryingly supposed to believe they can't hear her screaming for help despite being spitting distance away. It's all highly staged, amateurishly put together and one feels all happening just to enable Gulager to have the three of them running pointlessly between the gravestones for the next ten minutes. Zombie Night's problem is this scene becomes the template the rest of the film adheres to.

While I can maybe forgive a certain amount of contrived and convenient staging, here there's so little else it can't be overlooked and all the action, drama and tension is embarrassing and flat. I just have no idea what Gulager was going for. Even as a character piece positioning the film as real peoples experiences in the most traumatic of circumstance it utterly fails with people and performances shallow and forgettable. I'd almost go so far as saying I was quite early on rooting for the dead guys, and it was certainly a delightful relief when certain survivors got dispatched.

The western zombie cutty-cutter tropes are well made up and look the part though there's just too much staging and not enough of what I'd describe as natural behaviour for even these guys to save proceedings. Romero-esque gut munchers like this are all about instinct, hunger and teeth and I lost track of the number of times the zombie inexplicably suddenly held back from taking the bite so Gulager could try some cinematic wizardry and enable the following scenes to take place as written. It's head shots, it's some kind of virus with blood / saliva transmission, it's staggering, groaning, looking and acting stupid and some gut munching. It's groups appearing from no-where however remote, it's zombies outside the right window at the right time and zombies taking obvious cinematic direction and cues. It's nothing we've not seen a hundred times before, incompetently handled and insultingly perfunctory.

Insipid, derivative, uninteresting; there is nothing positive to say about Zombie Night. Utterly lacking cohesiveness, authenticity, the will to do well or any sparkle whatsoever, it's cinematic zombie fodder and deplorable bargain bin trash no one should give the time of day to. I'd started to think things were getting better as The Asylum's 2012 Rise of the Zombies was borderline watchable, but here things have gone backwards so far and so fast, I fear all hope the studio will eventually produce something of worth is lost. Zombie Night has no reason to exist, I've no reason to continue writing about it and you've no reason to ever think about it again; time for us all to move along, 2/10.

Steven@WTD.