Another zombie flick! This one will be the last for a while though, I think.
This is another subtitled movie, so if those aren’t for you I’d turn back now. This one was filmed in Quebec and is in French, there’s a little bit of dark humor to it at points in the beginning, but this isn’t a satire or comedy movie by any means. It’s actually one of the more bleak and depressing zombie movies I’ve watched recently.
This one doesn’t explain how the zombie outbreak occurred and that’s sort of a pet peeve of mine.
The zombies in this are agile and fast, they run screaming after their victims using a very inhuman type howl. There are a lot of scenes where there’s a tense silence followed by a zombie attack. I’m an easily startled person even if I know something is coming, which makes me a perfect schmuck to watch horror movies. This one got me a few times but it’s not like it was particularly well done, I just startle easily haha.
One of my favorite scenes was of a woman in a business suit, clearly giving 0 fucks, turning up the car stereo to attract some zombies (since they are attracted to noise) and just going to town on them with a machete.
There are some creepy as shit scenes with little kid zombies, child zombies are always on another level of creepy to me. I’m not sure why, but it’s a pretty common reaction. At least there were no baby zombies.
I liked some of the characters, there wasn’t really a ‘main character’ per se, there were a bunch of side characters making up a multi-layered story. I think my favorites were two older ladies who were holding down fort in a house, they were kind but also sort of badass. Who doesn’t want to watch old ladies with shot guns taking out zombies?
I tend to like movies where no one is safe, just because it adds to the suspense and makes things a little more realistic. This was definitely one of those movies, you never really knew who was going to make it out, and many of them don’t.
There were some plot holes in this one though, an older man tears a piece of bloody cloth off of a zombie to tie up a wound – that should definitely have caused an infection. There was electricity in some of the abandoned buildings, which didn’t make a lot of sense. The little worldbuilding there was outside of this rural forested town led me to believe that the world has already ended, and they’re in the last days.
There was also a mentally disturbed person who dressed in a crisp clean military uniform and went for daily walks. He thinks he’s returning from a mission he never went on, it’s all pretty sad. But, somehow, this guy meets a zombie and gets away from them totally unscathed – he wanders up to one of the characters, Bonin, and asks “What’s wrong with that lady, she tried to bite me”. This poor guy has no idea what’s going on but manages to stay alive wandering down a road being loud as shit, when to either side of him there are zombie-infested woods. I was kind of irked no one tried to help this dude, they just let him be loud and make jokes and wander off down the road alone.
Overall, there were some bits of this that were well done – there were a few exceptionally creepy scenes that revolve around people who aren’t infected but have completely lost their minds. But, there were other parts that were sloppy and not thought out very well.
My rating: 6.5/10