Contains
spoilers.
Now I first watched this
six months ago at a time I hadn't the time to pen my thoughts. Here we are now
with the time and inclination to do just that and I can't remember a single
thing about it. I think that in itself probably says quite a lot.
It's Berkeley, a
small town in Australia and the summer of 2002. Local beauty pageant winner
René (Felicity Mason) is hitching a lift away after losing her late parents
farm to the bank after defaulting on her payments, when they are forced to stop
as the road is closed. Obviously a nod to Night of the Living Dead, the cause of road closure accident was a meteorite shower which has the added side
effect of turning the citizens of the town into, duh duh duh! You guessed it
undead killers.
First off, it's safe
to say it's a very silly film with tongue firmly in cheek though out, and
obviously takes a lot of influence from zombie spoofs such as Dead Alive
(Braindead) and The Return of the Living Dead. The zombies, and their victims for
that matter, are comical blood-sponges with the ability to be sliced, smashed,
crushed and dismembered with ease and imagination, and the whole premise of aliens,
meteorites, acid rain, abductions is all as daft as it sounds.
After escaping her
first zombie encounter René finds herself holed up with local hero, bad-ass,
whack-job, poor shooting Marion (Mungo McKay) who also happens to be the only guy that seems to know exactly what's going on. Joined at the cabin and fallout shelter by an
ensemble of characters including the hilarious foul mouthed police chief Harrison (Dirk Hunter), they soon find
themselves under siege without food and water enjoying the same over the top
conflict we've come to expect when a group of disparate survivors are forced
together in an extremely tense situation.
The zombies are your
traditional brain eating, shambling critters we've come to cherish and like
many of its less serious contemporaries they regularly groan exactly what
they're after; Brrraaaiiiiinnnnsssss. They're capable of taking some pretty heavy punishment and are only put down for good with the a
good old heavy trauma to the head which our band of heroes seems incapable of
ever doing early on.
It really can't be
overstated just how eighties the film feels. The music, the special effects,
the hammy characters all come together with the ridiculous story to create
something truly daft but at least its intentional. The worst zombie films are
those that achieve this effect whilst trying to be earnest and serious but
despite how bad the film is it's never really quite bad enough; which might sound strange.
There's also the change of pace
with thirty minutes left on the clock, almost forgetting that it was a zombie farce with a change of style, scale and even seriousness as if Spielberg with his Close Encounters hat on had suddenly decided to take over. It's as if they suddenly realised they had a hundred times the budget and needed to spend it, or they didn't like the film they were making so decided to shoot and append another. It's all rather odd, not bad per-se but not what I was expecting, at all; oh and this all drags on way too long.
Steven@WTD.
I dig this movie. Silly, but I liked the characters and the story... The Spierig Brothers went on to "Daybreakers" after this, which was WAY more high budget...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I did wonder whether I was being a bit overly critical reading others thoughts after I'd reviewed it, and I loved Daybreakers...
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