Today was a day of clerical work for my job. I am on Spring Break right now, so that meant sitting on the floor in my family room and sorting and grading papers. This is usually the time I put Columbo on and let them play until I finish my work. Today, however, I chose to catch up on some movies. I do love them movie marathons when I go for them.
Today's choices are three films lurking in the Netflix Horror section. I decided to go for a theme, so I chose to go zombie. I am not too sure why, as the genre is on such an overkill right now I was almost destined to dislike each one of these.
First up was Re-Kill (2015). This one has been on the top of the Netflix banner for a while now and they seem to have been pushing it. So this one was destined to be one I was going to watch. I liked the premise enough, so what the heck?
The premise is this in a nutshell: Five years after the zombie outbreak there are special police forced assigned to take down zombies. These units are called the R-Division. I guess that is Re-kill Division. We get to tag along as part of a documentary film crew to experience the life of the police/soldiers/people in the R Division. Which means this is a documentary, shown from the cameraman's view style movie. Shaky-cam is all over the place.
The absolute best way to describe this movie is to call it Starship Troopers (right down to co-ed showers) by way of Blair Witch Project. We get to our movie by means of entering into the TV in the house of a little girl. Basically imagine yourself watching an episode of Cops, but with zombies. This means you get the commercials included. Commercials for safe-zone housing, pills to take daily to lessen your chance of infection if you are bit, and commercials for sex due to the world needing re-population.
Re-Kill is a decent enough movie, but it did wear on me with all of the darkness and shaky camera. I didn't really like any of the characters too much, so my emotional attachment was fairly light. I would recommend it if you have nothing else to watch but want to see zombies in a little bit of a different style. The commercials are almost worth the time. Aside from the grammatical and spelling errors I did notice in the commercials.
Next up was Stalled (2013). How do you make a zombie film more claustrophobic than Night of the Living Dead? Have the whole thing take place in a bathroom stall! That is pretty much the whole premise of this British film. A hapless janitor gets trapped in the women's bathroom during a Christmas party as the zombie apocalypse happens. Eventually another person (a lady) also gets trapped in the stalls and they spend the whole movie avoiding the zombies outside their door while chatting with each other. The movie does a decent job giving us enough humor to keep us interested. We never see the female character's face, but the way the film makers show her conversation bits is very well done. She becomes quite a likable character, even if all we have is her voice and a very simple vision of her.
I should mention that when the movie started I was wondering if the movie would be silent. We go a long time before we have any dialogue at all, and then when we do have some it is the pointless chat of two women in the bathroom. But for a good amount of time we spend without any dialogue at all. I was almost a little saddened when we did start to get dialogue.
My favorite of the three zombie flicks today was the last one I watched. Kill Zombie! (2012, original title Zombibi). This is basically Netherland's answer to Shaun of the Dead. A zombie horror/comedy film that centers around two friends (brothers, actually) trying to rescue the girl. There is more to it than that, but that is the basic premise. The two brothers are accompanied with two gang member that they are in jail with, one of the police officers that is in the station during the outbreak, and another prisoner.
OK, here it is a little more clear. Two brothers get arrested for getting in a fight at a party. The two guys and them are all arrested. While in jail a Russian space center crashed into the building one of the brothers works in. This unleashes the zombie apocalypse. Our prisoners, however, have no idea this has happened, due to being in jail and being asleep.
The next day they awaken to find the jail cell door open. So they escape. As they do they find the world destroyed and they encounter the zombies. From there they are saved by the female police officer in the poster and the trek to save a co-worker/love interest starts up.
No, Kill Zombie! is not new territory. No, there are no ground breaking effects (in fact the blood is CGI, so that is a big negative). No, it is not dark and gloomy and scary.
What Kill Zombie! does do is give us some great characters. Every single one of the traveling team we love (OK, one of them we only like, but he turns bad). The interplay between them all is great, especially the two brothers, and then the "loser" brother and his relationship with the gang members. The movie carries a lot of fun with it.
An added bit that works extremely well are the news bits. We are brought up to speed of the apocalypse with a news anchor who interjects from time to time. These bits are wonderfully wacky and rather twisted at times. I could possibly see some people finding them pointless, but if you are in line with the comedy aspect of the movie these bits are just added fun.
All three of these movies are worth a little bit of time. None of them were regrets. But I would say to go in reverse order of what I have here. Kill Zombie! is a definite view. Stalled is one that is worth it just for the unique style of it. Re-Kill is worth it if you enjoy the others movies that obviously helped to inspire this one. All three movies, oddly enough, rely on CGI blood splatter.
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