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.

Mission Impossible II

Treasure Of The 
Chimera Mardre

Mission Impossible II
2000 USA/Germany
Directed by John Woo
DVD Region 2

Okay, so on to the next review as I watch the Mission Impossible films for the first time, courtesy of my dad (see my review of the first one here).

So four years after DePalma’s first movie hit cinemas, famous Chinese action director John Woo was called in to direct the second in the ongoing series and, as you would expect, delivered a much different film to the first one. I actually remember the trailer which ran for this in cinemas at the time, of Tom Cruise getting all ‘Kirked up’ and climbing a mountain and a nice quote from Anthony Hopkins along the lines of “Mr. Hunt, this isn't mission difficult, it's mission impossible.” I must say, the trailer looked quite good but there was no way I would be going to the cinema to see it because I hadn’t seen the first one. 13 years later... I’ve now fixed that issue.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I‘ve not seen that much Woo... but I know he makes some of the most respected ‘kinetic action ballet’ style of movies out there. I’d seen only four of his other films before this and I remember three of those - The Killer, Hard Boiled and Paycheck - being pretty good... unfortunately this man also made a terrible movie called Face Off which, to paraphrase a great writer once again, I only managed to survive the tedium of by gnawing one of my own legs off.

He seems to have a couple of trademark features to his films that I can make out... one is a white dove which always seems to get in there somewhere (a little like director John Glen’s pigeon obsession), this film being no exception and the other being that there’s usually a fair amount of slow motion footage during action sequences which, in all honesty, I do find kind of dull. Woo uses these to highlight certain details of a sequence he wants to stick in your mind... much like Eisenstein would take an isolated shot of an individual in close up, isolated away from the crowd he or she is in, to emphasise the emotion or detail of a scene... that is, if Eisenstein had been filming people driving high speed vehicles and shooting about a gazilllion rounds of ammunition a second at each other.

Well there’s plenty of his slow motion stuff in here too... especially in the end fist fight between Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character and the main villain of the piece, played by Dougray Scott (who I previously saw in the Doctor Who episode Hide, reviewed here...). However, there is one use of slow motion right near the opening of the picture, which introduces Thandie Newton’s “lovable thief” romantic interest character and throws her into the mix of things as Tom Cruise first catches her eye while they are both observing some Spanish flamenco dancing... and the flamenco steps are slowed down. This "dance" of these characters’ opening encounter is something which does catch the imagination somewhat and it’s also something which the director takes great pains to emphasise as an echo within the body of the rest of the movie... and which I think is a good thing because I’m guessing that emphasis wouldn’t eccessarily have been something which was actually written into the script. It’s done almost subliminally during key moments, by the use of Hans Zimmer’s fairly interesting scoring, which every now and again will reference back to that flamenco music to remind us that Cruise and his new leading lady definitely have... “a thing” for each other. And this works really well.

I say it’s a different kind of film from the first one and certainly there’s a lot more sweeping elegance to the shooting style but, although John Woo had the script written around the action scenes he already wanted to include as set pieces (and not the other way around as most traditional directors would do), the film is not exactly an action fest in terms of content and I’m afraid to say that, while I prefer good writing over high speed action pieces any day, this second outing suffers from exactly the same problem tht the first film did. That is to say, the story and events depicted are really obvious and predictable all the way through.

It’s very obvious, given the parameters of the Mission Impossible branding, that various twist scenes are just not going to work. The whole plot being centred around a sample of a deadly virus called Chimera, for example, almost screams out for one of the Mission Impossible team to get infected, causing a 20 hour time limit to that person expiring unless the virus can be obtained. Of course, way before the time this actually happens in the movie, you will have figured out who, how and certainly why this happens... which is a shame because I suspect that could have been rewritten as a really strong and dynamic part of the plot.

Similarly, a good five minutes before we see the leading actor ostensibly shot by one of the bad guys (so “bad” he went on to play Dracula in Stephen Sommer’s Van Helsing), it’s pretty obvious by the way the scene is shot, even before either of the characters are through the door in a particular scene, that Cruise has switched their identity with the aid of the “not very convincing” face masks people use to steal each others personae with in these films.

But, as the first entry in the series, there is some good stuff going on here too, with a great "bath/robbery" scene between Cruise and Newton near the start of the movie and a truly poetic, wire work fist fight at the end which isn’t anything new (even for the time) but is certainly more than watchable, especially when pitched with Zimmer’s effective choral and percussion music which does a lot to elevate a fair few of the action scenes to a certain level of quality... much like Elfman’s did in the first movie although, to be fair to Mr. Elfman and in hindsight, having now heard the music as a stand alone experience, Elfman’s score did suffer a lot more in the mix than Zimmer’s does here, where it gets a fair amount of highlighting against the inevitable bullets, bikes and bangs.

A lot of people have said to me that the second and third movies in the four to date are a lot worse than the original. I don’t think the second movie, at any rate, is any worse than De Palma’s opening salvo... I just think it’s a similar film done differently. So, honestly, if you liked the first one and haven’t seen this one, I’m guessing this will be a far from intolerable experience for you. Check it out sometime.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout