Portrait of a Zombie - review

2012 (Ireland)

2013 Studiocanal DVD R(2)

Contains spoilers.

Portrait of a Zombie is the story of young, but dead Billy Murphy. Now Billy isn't like other zombies. Yes, he's a cannibalistic gut-munching serial-killer in waiting, with rotting flesh, blood-stained hair and clothing and quite the unpleasant aroma. What makes Billy special, is the love of his family, especially that of a mother who will quite literally do everything to carry on her role to both protect him from an outside world that wants to put a bullet in his head, and her state of denial that keeping a delirious inhuman monster chained up close to your other loved ones is quite frankly seriously mentally deranged, never mind negligent. It's also the story of amateur documentary maker (played by Todd Fletcher) and his increasingly desperate and actionable efforts to capture the situation in a way that will see him attain stardom and fortune.

Now, brush aside the low budget, a purported £100k, look and feel of the film, and also brush aside the interesting shall we say, directorial style, which I believe was more forced on them, to move from the standard 'b-movie' composure, to a mockumentary hybrid, with the story exposed both through interviews and the traditional vantage, which at times feels at odds with each other. What director, co-writer and co-producer Bing Bailey has attempted here should first and foremost be applauded. Portrait of a Zombie is ambitious, genre-breaking and making, and both disturbing and interesting; and for the first thirty minutes captivating and coherently assembled. The family lead by the delightful Lizzie (Geraldine McAlinden) and Danny Murphy (Rory Mullen) are full of sincerity, the set-up whilst already stretching does hold reasonably together, and the use of the film crew with their interviews is the perfect vehicle to present the insular working class Dublin suburb narrative. It's all good, if a bit slow, competent low budget film making.

So where does it all go wrong? All of Portrait of a Zombie's problems stem from trying to keep up the pretence; the implausible plausibility of a set-up that's been so carefully built. I could just about grasp some level of responsibility and ownership of a child that's become a zombie; to wrestle with grief and the acceptance that at some point this dangerous shell would have to be let go of. I could also just about go along with the idea that the authorities could possibly be taking a while to catch up to a new isolated, extraordinary and limited condition, and putting together a legal framework to challenge a guardians rights of responsibility, could be causing a few head scratches. Where it all started to go wrong for me, wasn't when additional zombies starting appearing, killing and eating en-masse, it was the fact that not one soldier nor so much as one bobby-on-the beat thought it prudent to even show up. Also, with a backdrop of death and gut-spewing carnage, even after Billy has eaten his pregnant girlfriend, do his ma and pa think to agree to the wishes of the entire neighbourhood and rid everyone of this clear and present danger.

The 'But he's ma son', card is just played too many times and whilst Bailey could have turned it more into the black comedy, than keeping straight, there are just never enough laughs, nor does it start down this path early enough to think it was ever an option; all of which makes late scenes such as an unfathomable sequence with a newly stumped camera-man acting as if it was merely a nuisance, Monty Python Black Knight-esque, and the uncomfortable and drawn out self-mutilation mother and son moment the more incongruous and desperate.

Now I've read the contrasting reviews, which seem to swing from scathing, or refer to it positively as the next coming, which it could be said actually occurred one year later when Channel 4 brought the series In the Flesh to screen. Like Portrait of a Zombie, at least to start with, it spun things round, but unlike Portrait, it actually held it together with a brilliant narrative and believable structure; all bonded with an extra level of professionalism, gravitas and depth. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. No doubt hampered with budgetary concerns, the ideas and undoubted talent that were clearly present here were not enough to pull it all together into a coherent or persuasive whole. Also, despite other smaller issues; the zombie back-story and identity is firmly and well established, the zombie kills (zombies on humans) were well presented, and the acting always coherent; which if the narrative had managed to match might have actually made this quite the feast the cover (another cheap re-release with a cover that has no connection to the film) alluded to.  4/10. 

Steven@WTD.

The Last Days on Mars - review

2013 (UK / Ireland)

2014 Universal Pictures UK Blu-ray R(All)

Contains spoilers.

That escalated quickly. One minute there's a tight soap-opera, with space weary astronauts and scientists, anxiously and frustratingly riling each other as they prepare for their long haul back to Earth, knowing they've been unsuccessful in their mission to find life on the red planet. The next, there's a crazed homicidal zombie battering the airlock with his gaunt black skinned face hell bent on death, carnage and really spoiling the going away party. And that's the thing. As much as I enjoyed début director Ruairi Robinson's claustrophobic little zombie survival story there's just not enough subtlety and nuance to proceedings. The result, while competently put together with a strong narrative and its solid cast, is never more than its constituent parts; it's all rather bland and safe, and it's a bit of a pity.

Their timing is atrocious. Okay they would be arriving back at Earth without plaudits, their mission deemed a failure, with a new crew already well on the way to scientific immortality, but one more day, nineteen hours to be precise, to stay out of trouble and they'd still be alive. We've watched enough horrors by now though to know it only takes a little over-extending, a small bending of the rules and a tiny bit of deceit by one self-centred idiot to put in motion a series of events that leaves most, if not all, others in a world of pain. And in The Last Days on Mars it's Marko Petrovic (Goran Kostic) the eight person crew has to thank, who on the eve of evacuation decides he'll break protocol and lie to take one final trip out to a site he believes may contain fossilized evidence of bacterial life; though instead of bringing him fame and fortune, it brings him a bad fall and a nasty case of dead and zombie.

The action is gripping, the effects lavish and production polished it's just the ensuing hour of good quality zombie shenanigans is rather formulaic and by the number. A fight here, a siege there, another fight here, a bit of betrayal and a last ditch plan to survive it's good manic fun but just all a bit derivative and predictable. It's also all rather in your face with little play with suspense or ambiguity. Marko lies dead in an alien pit, Lauren Dalby (Yusra Warsama) is left alone to stand guard while the rest of the crew lead by Charles Brunel (Elias Koteas) go get the body-in-alien-fungus-hole-retrieval-kit. On returning they're gone but there's some obvious tracks leading back to the base, which the film cuts to just in time to see them arrive, in full-on no-nonsense zombie siege mode. There's really no pause for breath, no time to gather thoughts, establish motivations, build tension. They arrive, they get in, they start bashing heads and drilling stomachs and we're expected to go along with it all.

There's no mention of zombies on the box and it could easily have been a film I overlooked, but it's as zombie as you can get. The black veined oxygen deprived gut munchers are very much dead in the human sense with total loss of self and identity. They're highly infectious, they're driven with an insatiable hunger to kill, and possibly eat their victims and they really look the part, though with a c. $7m budget I'd expect them too. It's the alien bacteria that's responsible for all the trouble and the film adheres to the tried and tested trope that dictates blood exposure to lead to slow painful death then death to zombie, and there's not much in the way of dubiousness. Though for mindless homicidal brutes they're pretty nifty with all the tools, machinery and explosives they use to use, which maybe opens some coherency issues, but really it just cements their credentials as 'A' tier zombie bad assess one should not want to trifle with.

The Last Days on Mars is a solid action oriented space horror that doesn't really do much wrong other than not dare to be a more intelligent and passionate. With little emotional depth to the characters and some rather sombre performances the atmosphere of peril and dread you feel should be pervasive and consuming fails to appear, and the pain, anguish and ultimate deaths of the crew fail to carry much weight. This is no more exemplified than with star of the show Liev Schreiber as Vincent Campbell, hero and lone survivor, and the deliberately left-open final life and death scene, and my genuine lack of concern and enthusiasm towards its outcome.

With fighting scenes that are nicely choreographed and look great there's a simple uncompromising action horror here that will entertain, and Mars does make a beautiful back drop for full on zombie fun; it's just, like the red planet itself, lacking in atmosphere, and all rather flat and lifeless - 6/10.

Steven@WTD.

Dead Meat - review

2004 (Ireland)

2005 Revolver Entertainment DVD R(2) 

Contains spoilers.

'Old O'Conner had a farm, ee-i-ee-o, and on that farm he had some cows ee-i-ee-o. With a mooeerrgghhhh mooeerrgghhhhhere here, a mooeerrgghhhh mooeerrgghhhh there. Here a mooeerrgghhhh, there a mooeerrgghhhh, everywhere a mooeerrgghhhh mooeerrgghhhh. Old O'Conner had a farm, ee-i-ee-o.' Zombie cows eh, that's a new one, and yes it sounds ridiculous, hell, it is ridiculous, but at least it gives debut Director / Writer Conor McMahon's otherwise rather samey low budget bland zombie Night of the Living Dead remake, something unique that one will remember it by.

Mad Cow Disease or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a rather nasty neurodegenerative disease that came to wide spread attention in the eighties, especially in the UK after some bright spark thought the best way to feed cows on the cheap was to offer them the culinary delight that was the brains and spinal cords of cows that may or may not be already infected. Anyway, after 180,000 infected, a cull of 4.4 million and the meat entering the human food chain, mutating into Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and killing 177, farmers decided that maybe they should stick to grass.

So what does this have to do with Dead Meat? Well, Dead Meat in a playful twist on real life events, has cows rather than stagger about dumbly as their brains turn to mush, instead turn into homicidal bovine butcherers hell bent on rampaging across the green fields of County Leitrim, Ireland, looking for people to bite and spread the epizootic-love too. Dead Meat is also a clever play on words to both point to the dead meat fed to the cows in the first place, and the state couple Helena (Marián Araújo) and Martin (David Ryan) and the scant other survivors find themselves in, as they battle to stay one step ahead of the ever increasing horde / herd.

One has to always frame reviews of film projects such as this in context. Financed in part by an Irish Film Board grant, it was filmed in just three weeks under frugal conditions making use of the production crew's own vehicles and sets and reliant on the good nature of locals who agreed to act as last minute extras. What I'm saying is, it was never going to be able to directly compete production wise, with the many million dollar franchises I've also reviewed. But the one thing independent films like this do have in their favour is the ability to be highly original, so the fact other than having zombie cows, it's all rather formulaic, is a disappointment.

On the one hand, like I said, we have a fairly safe Irish take on Night of the Living Dead; a couple get lost, the girl gets away and is harried across the countryside by an ever increasing undead presence until she meets up with a few other survivors before we have the big  final siege. It's well shot, pretty well acted and competently put together with some real attention to spice things up with gnarly bits of Fulci-esque gore-porn and pulls off the remake. On the other hand it tries a bit too hard at times to be a bit Evil Dead with dark and zany elaborate kills that just end up feeling out of place, and an odd-ball couple who feel like they've just dropped in straight from the set of Father Ted. The humour just never really gels with the competent little survival horror idling along in the background, taking over scenes and detracting from the flow.

This identity crisis travels over into the zombies themselves. The first gut muncher we come across is traditional picture perfect. He gets run over, his pulse is clearly marked as past-tense, he rises again devoid of humanity and takes a bite. The second however is a little more refined. He can wield a weapon, use a tool to break down a door and knows enough to stand on a hand to keep his victim in place, while he un-sticks said weapon to take another swipe. He's more homicidal crazy with a modicum of self-awareness and intelligence than primal gut muncher, as are the weapon wielding Irish-hill-billies that suddenly come tumbling into the arena to join the chase. And it's like this through the film, one minute it's a Romero plodder slowly and inevitably closing in, the next it's a screaming gurgling crazy (who might not actually be dead). Add to this the hint that the cows may actually be some kind of bovine-puppet-masters with the ability to organise the infected to group and attack en masse and we're left with an enemy that feels a bit thrown together at the last minute; I should add they look that way too.

A bit of a confused mess Conor McMahon's film making and core narrative do manage to salvage the film enough to be above the usual mediocre low budget zombie cash-ins. It's not a film I could hand on heart ever recommend, but if you happen to find it on and can't be bothered to stretch for the remote to find something else, rest assured you will be entertained, the action is well scripted, the gore and effects show attention to detail, the acting is solid and there are more than a few moments that will stick in your head once the credits roll. An unspectacular amateur action / horror, Dead Meat is overall okay, and sometimes that's enough - 4/10.

Steven@WTD.

Wake Wood - review

2011 (Ireland / UK)

2011 Momentum Pictures Home Entertainment DVD R(2)

Contains spoilers.

I'm starting to think the odd month or two break is probably for the best. I mean, I do enjoy a good bit of post apocalyptic bloodshed and eye gouging but I'm starting to think the relentless tide of misery, despair, death and hopelessness does get a bit too much after a while. Still we're back and refreshed after a lot of turkey, mince pies, oodles of booze, a lot of Zombicide, and finally, as if you'd missed it, the release of my post apocalyptic father / daughter love short story.

I picked up Wake Wood after reading Kev's commentary at Zombie Hall thinking as a low budget British horror with zombie elements in it would be right up my proverbial alley and I'm pleased to say it was. The only question mark is whether those returning from the dead in the quaint secluded hamlet of Wake Wood could actually be called zombies; and whether in any sense this could really be thought of as a zombie film.

Wake Wood, the brain child of writer Brendan McCarthy and co writer / director David Keating is a character drama gently addressing the inconsolable process of healing after the most painful of bereavements, it's also a fantastical fantasy / medieval folk story about a village with an incredulous secret and it's also quite the scary horror with some almost full on exploitative Fulci style deaths. That it attempts and achieves all of the above without ever feeling disjointed or segmented is in itself  surprising, that it does so retaining its poignancy, mood and message is commendable. Wake Wood is a beautifully crafted intelligently told narrative with a strong cohesive identity and despite the pure fantasy of the central device the core message is never devalued and the film retains its identity through to the satisfactory ending.

Patrick and Louise Daley (Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle) are struggling with the unfortunate death of their only daughter Alice (Ella Connolly). It's a year later, they've moved out the city to the small rural village of Wake Wood and with their relationship on the precipice they're given the glimmer of hope as they slowly uncover Wake Wood's secret. For one reason or another this small parish and it's citizens are able through folk magic and ritual to resurrect the recently deceased for three days where they can say their final farewells and find peace. Lead by Arthur, the retired village veterinarian (Timothy Spall) the villagers accept Patrick and Louise as one of their own and agree to help them see their daughter again.

Here's the deal. Using the life-force of the recently deceased, in this case the local farmer Mick O'Shea (Dan Gordon) who got slightly too intimate with a large moody heifer, Arthur is able to incant the old gods and forces and return the body and soul of someone else who has been dead less than a year. The old body has it's spinal cord cut and a charm from the one who is to come back placed in the mouth before being encased in some kind of muddy/clay cast and set alight. David Keating has captured the pagan ritual splendidly both extolling the sense of wonder and magic while firmly entrenching idea that this is both something old, familiar and pragmatic to those that have grown up with it as the norm.

Patrick and Louise are informed they have three days before Alice will have to return, that for all intents and purposes she will be as before with memories of both her time on earth and her time 'over there' and when the time comes she will leave of her own accord. The caveats are, she will be unable to leave the village and its lands and Patrick and Louise must commit themselves to the village accepting their bodies will be used in a similar fashion when the time comes.

In many ways I saw Alice and the others who returned as form of revenant, a departed soul brought back to conclude any unfinished business and make peace with those who were most affected. Alice has a heartbeat, she breathes, she is who she was and in that position she isn't a zombie as I now come to define them. There's no loss, no deadness to her return, she is alive, vibrant and in control. She's alice and Alice, just making a short trip back to the land of the living, well kind of...

This is a horror, or more precisely, a film with horror elements and while I'd probably agree it would still have worked as a tender and respectful character drama the direction McCarthy and Keating decided to take it is also compelling. Patrick and Louise kept a secret too and it's one that ultimately changes the tone of the film and how one thinks of Alice. Alice had been dead more than a year and while the small girl who returned is the same daughter they lost, something else, something more sinister and malevolent has fused and accompanied her.

It's subtle, it's never really explained and it could be argued all a bit narratively convenient, but the ambiguity as to why a year is the cut off is important, what the possessive demon-esque force that co-inhabits Alice's shell is or why it would want to sadistically rampage through the village all add to the atmosphere and mystique. Alice is now a revenant in the more traditional sense, a medieval corpse returned to terrorise the living and as such and seen perhaps as the resurrected body of Alice but not THE Alice, then the term zombie is befitting. I would probably argue the transformation of the film from loving soul search and pagan earth magic healing to one of bloodshed and carnage, is perhaps a little too full on and sudden, but I get where McCarthy and Keating were coming from, and they just about get away with it. Also the ritualised murder and mayhem Alice brings to the party at this point is also well constructed and filmed, and definitely entertaining to watch.

Wake Wood is an extremely accomplished film. Stylish and atmospheric with an ambient appropriate background score it establishes a clear identity early on and despite two distinct narrative transformations never loses it. All the main actors do an exemplary job portraying very believable characters dealing with extremely harrowing and difficult emotions and at no point are you ever pulled out the world McCarthy and Keating have created. Yes one does have to let oneself flow with it and not ask too many questions but the film makes this remarkably easy to do. The story flows gently but without strain and the underlying tension is allowed to build at its own pace. A unique film; perhaps not strictly zombie, but of genre interest, memorable and thought provoking, 7/10.

Steven@WTD.