The ReZort

Hi-Di-Die

The ReZort
Directed by Steve Barker
UK/Spain/Belgium 2015
88 Films

Warning: A spoiler towards the end of this one.

The ReZort is yet another film I picked up on DVD for free at FrightFest a number of years ago but, it’s also one of the better of the freebies I’ve received from them. Like the majority of films made around a zombie outbreak, this one seems pretty low budget (unless you’re getting into something like World War Z) but, it’s quite a solid one and has a great premise.

This one opens up with some ‘found footage’ of a TV crew which is incorporated into a news bulletin and, for a while I thought this would be the format overall... but it’s just for this prologue to the story, to explain the world of the movie. Which is this... there was a big zombie outbreak, a la George Romero, and everyone on Earth was at war with the undead. The humans won and are slowly recovering their mental health and social interactions post ‘holocaust’ but, out of that, when a business woman discovered an island full of zombies, she turned it into a holiday resort. Basically a kind of Westworld but where people pay exorbitant fees to have a holiday blowing away the undead in a completely safe environment. There’s also a charity which has tents full of refugees in the same neighbourhood. However, the news team rushes to get a closer look at the Island because something has gone wrong and the ‘Brimstone Protocol’ has been triggered, which means the resort wil be obliterated by bombs to stop any zombie infection escaping within the next twelve hours. What went wrong?

Then, after the title card, we go into normal 3rd person viewpoint camerawork, with graceful, smooth movements in contrast to the cold opening. We cut to 10 days earlier and meet one of the main leads, the apocalypse haunted Melanie (played by Jessica De Gouw) and her boyfriend Lewis (played by Martin McCann). Melanie is haunted by whatever experiences she had in the pandemic and so she buys tickets for her and her ex-military boyfriend to get a cathartic release shooting zombies on the island. Then we get a beautiful shot of the company’s speedboat from above, cutting through the ocean and dropping off Melanie, Lewis and assorted other guests at the island. Including a shady character called Sadie (played by Elen Rhys) and a natural leader (and excellent shot) called Archer (played by Dougray Scott).

The guests party and then are taken out for their first kills, one group of many doing exactly the same thing on the island, where zombies are chained to moving targets in a walkthrough compound, for example, or shot at in great numbers from a safe distance (and, of course, if you don’t hit them in the head, they’re completely reuseable over and over as targets). However, the night before they go out for their first time, Sadie, who turns out to be an ‘undead rights activist’ sneaks in behind the scenes, hacks the security and swipes some files with all the statistics of the island, not realising that she has been set up and she is also downloading a nasty virus in the process. A virus which, inevitably, takes hold when everyone is out on their hunting parties. Very quickly, all the zombies get loose, eat most of management and go on the rampage. The aforementioned Brimstone Protocol is unleashed and the dwindling survivors have to try and make their way to safety before the island is bombed.

That’s the basic set up and the rest of the film follows Melanie, Lewis, Sadie, Archer and a few others as the usual stress dynamics play out while they are all trying to help each other get off the island. But it’s pretty entertaining and, while the low budget shows a little, perhaps, it’s extremely well executed and the zombies and the ‘shoot in the head and move on’ modus operandi of almost every post 60s zombie film is all nicely represented. There are the usual suspenseful, ‘sneaking around’ moments, coupled and punctuated with the usual ‘everybody run while we switch to hand held camera’ sequences and it’s all very nicely staged. It also makes the smart call and keeps it simple enough that it doesn’t go outside its original set up... apart from a nice revelation which, to be fair, I saw coming right from the start...

At some point in the film, the surviving few humans discover that the near unlimited supply of zombies in the resort are being topped up with deliberately infected numbers of the refugees, the charity being in on it for the profits also. But that’s a nice piece of satire and, although the film is already ten years old, it couldn’t be more relevant in the UK right now, where the recent coronavirus pandemic is fresh on everyone’s minds and you wonder if the current government might have also solved their ‘refugee crisis’ with a simlarly brutal tactic (which is possibly not far from the truth when you think of what the last government have been doing regard to Rwanda and so forth).

So that’s me done on The ReZort, I think. Except to say that the last minute appearance of a second human survivor from the island wasn’t something I was buying at all, considering the impossible odds he had when he sacrificed himself for one of the other characters. Still, I really enjoyed this one and it’s always nice to add another competently made romp of a zombie movie to the list. Definitely worth a look if zombies are your thing.