Ultimate Zombie Feast

No Mean Feast

Ultimate Zombie Feast
Directed by Various
Monster DVD Region 0

I’d forgotten I’d bought this collection on its release, at the tale end of last year, specifically so I could review it on this blog. My reacquaintance with the short form, low budget arm of the arts is slowly getting reappraised the more I see. However, as you’d expect, this collection is a little hit and miss, both on professional production values and on entertainment. Touted on the back of the DVD as “more than five hours of outstanding new zombie films from around the world”, this compilation of low budget celebrations of the undead certainly didn’t fail to keep me engaged, in places... but if this is really the cream of the crop in terms of the use of the word “outstanding”... then there must be some really dire films being made out of there. Which is probably true because I understand that zombie movies are the easiest and cheapest kinds of movies to make... so everyone and their lifeless zombie ghoul of a dog is out shooting them.

Here then, are my quick little capsule reviews of the 16 films, spread across the two discs of this release.

Zombeer
This one takes the same kind of tone as two thirds of the shorts on this disc... in that it’s playing the genre for laughs. It’s slickly shot, however, with lovely colours and a post credits blink and you'll miss it reference to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, so the director scored a point with me for that. Inconsequential, like many on this disc, but fun. There is, though, a terribly flawed sense of logic when it comes to the origins of the zombie outbreak and, as almost all feature films made in this sub-genre, the majority of the rest of the movies after this don’t even try to explain the causes.

Zombies and Cigarettes
A fast paced Spanish action zombie flick which homages George A. Romero in at least as much as it’s set in a shopping mall. There’s a real understanding of how the language of cinema can best be used and it’s especially noticeable in a neat moment which pitches one extreme of sound against dead calm. Annoying, badly translated subtitles don’t do this movie any favours though. Would have thought the DVD company would have taken care of that for them.

Plague
This is the first serious movie without any humour in the collection. Impressive use of shot design and editing combined to make a few people seem like hordes of zombies and, simple as the solutions used are, it’s something a lot of the other movies here could have learned from. It also takes time to build up the main protagonist as a character for you to invest in, which is a bit of a plus.

Bitten
This is a five minute character study of a woman who has survived an unseen zombie attack, but who has been bitten. Our camera eye observes her as she tries to come to terms with the fact that she is turning, little by little, into a zombie. Fairly intense if you can get past some of the make up choices and over the top acting moments.

Arise
Not the best on the compilation. Set in a factory, it's a straight "bug hunt" of a movie once the zombie virus hits. Some of the acting is okay though but the wig worn by the Jason Mewes clone in one scene in this is laughable.

Not Even Death
This is a quickie character study of a man keeping his zombie wife chained in the basement. Slightly marred by the fact that the blurb in the introduction promised some kind of twist at the end when there actually wasn't one. The actress playing the wife was pretty good though.

Fear Of The Living Dead
This one has a sense of narrative and closure, courtesy of a twist ending which, unfortunately for me, I thought was pretty easy to see coming. One mistake this has though is to show deserted streets (aka the standard last man on earth scenarios) but they're all neat and tidy  locations with no zombie mayhem set-dressing on them... so when you do see the zombies hit the streets, it all looks kinda clean and incongruous. A nice enough diversion, however.

Kidz
Possibly the best film on this first disc, Kidz is the tale of three MTV generation/video game playing children who are orphaned by the zombie apocalypse and immediately leap into action, handling all the survival stuff with ease, where adults just get things all wrong. This one doesn’t have so much as a twist ending as a nice little flourish which normally wouldn’t work, but does here... It actually crept up on me without me guessing what it would be. Definitely worth a look.

The Book Of The Dead
The longest film in the selection. It's also the one which drags the most. While a couple of the performers are good it tries hard to deliver more of a story arc but ultimately the knowing references to other films (“Zed's dead baby!”) are not particularly subtle enough and the fact that none of the jokes really work, combined with an irritating opening title sequence which just drags on forever, makes this not just the longest film on offer here, but also the weakest.

Zombie Harvest
The second disc doesn't start off as strongly as I'd hoped, although the opening titles, an homage (or steal of sorts) from the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet is nice enough and the "head up a cow’s backside" gag is obvious but still quite surprising. There's no real story arc on this, just the beginning of a zombie outbreak played for laughs. Competent but not as entertaining as I'd been expecting.

The Skin Of Your Teeth
This one's okay, less for the zombie effects (which are kinda secondary anyway) and more for the sense of the characters as rural survivors, honestly played by the four actors in question, and the way they interact with each other makes for a more believable scenario. The dead ended conclusion (no pun intended in this case) leads for an unfortunate lack of closure and renders this short sketch kinda pointless… but that's not necessarily a criticism of a piece of art… more of an observation of this particular one, which I would have liked to have seen, out of all of the shorts up to this point, expanded into a feature film.

Zomblies
Zomblies is a very different beast to the other films on these discs. It's very professional and it's a standard military rescue mission gone wrong film. The basic plot is - rescue the surviving members of the  first mission, get the viral samples they were trying to grab and then get back "over the wall" with as many as you came in with. A brilliant group of actors play in this shoot-and-chase mini epic which, at just over 40 mins, is well worth the price of the DVD. It stands up there with similarly military VS monsters movies as Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers and... even the post end credit's nod to Ridley Scott's Gladiator and the Star Wars references don’t distract from a tip top example of a lower than low budget being put to really good use. If you like movies like A L I E N S and the aforementioned Dog Soldiers, then this is like a lower budget mini-replay of the same kind of material.

It Came From The West
This is a lively, if slightly overlong, “puppet's with chainsaws and spurty blood” presentation which mixes the zombie movie with standard American and Spaghetti Western tropes. It's quite fun in places although there's not a heck of a lot of story and once the novelty of puppets dying or re-dying from horrible wounds grinds on... at a quarter of an hour in length it kind of wears out its welcome a little. Nice to have something so different on this collection though.

Paris By Night Of The Living Dead
This is a terrible movie which looks like it could have been a starting off point for REC 3 but is ultimately just a blurry mess. And I mean, literally blurry. It looks like it’s either been shot on low definition videotape or maybe blown up from a file which would have been best served as a little, small sized internet presentation. I'm trying to forget this waste of a decent title.

Savages
Indian film Savages certainly gives Zomblies a run for its money for being the best film on this collection. The lush jungle settings are well shot and the editing is fantastic. More important than that, though, is the way the script and acting builds up the relationships between the characters on this tale of four guys who go trekking in a biohazardous, forbidden zone. I was worried when, after about a minute, there was some dancing, but the tone and pace soon settles down and this is a well realised and, given its obvious budgetary shortcomings, well crafted zombie movie.

Dead Hungry
A joyful movie of comedy gold. It's all in the timing and the performances by the main zombie protagonist and his zombie girlfriend. All he wants is some brains to eat, but those pesky humans, and other zombies, keep stopping him from getting to his food supply in this, quite literally, eye popping gem of a short. For anybody who's ever laughed at the violence in a horror movie, this short told through the eyes of a zombie is right up your street.


And that’s it. If this had stopped at just the contents of the first disc, I’d say don’t bother with it. But by the time the second disc is watched, it turns out that five or six of these movies are worth having. There’s no way anybody not into the zombie genre, or just starting out exploring those kinds of movies, would ever want to give these a spin. There are, for the most part, better feature length movies out there giving you a lot more than these shorts have to offer. If, however, you are a veteran of the zombie genre and you need a fix and don’t mind ploughing through some less nourishing gruel to find the hidden gems, then this collection is something that you might just come to cherish as time wears on.

The Horde (La Horde)

Horde Oeuvres


The Horde (La Horde) 
France 2009
Directed by Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher
Momentum Pictures Region 2

The Horde is a French zombie movie which trades under the comparison, on the DVD cover at any rate, of being Dawn Of The Dead meets Die hard. Personally, I think this particular comparison pitch is pretty inaccurate now that I’ve seen the movie myself... I’d say it’s more like a less frenetic version of the recent action movie The Raid (reviewed here) than anything else. Oh... plus it has those dynamic, we-can-run-around-a-bit kind of zombies that have started to be introduced as a solution to create a more urgent sense of peril in a contemporary audience. That’s okay, I can live with that... I’m not that much of a traditionalist.

Actually, The Raid is a pretty sound analogy, I reckon, because this movie too starts out with a small team of cops infiltrating a block of flats to “take out” the bad guys responsible for the death of their friend (the movie starts off with the funeral). Like The Raid, things go to hell in a hand basket quite quickly for them with a few of them getting iced quite speedily and the remaining survivors being taken prisoner by the very bad guys they are trying to kill.

The bad guys, it seems, have been infected with some quite virulent movie clichés which this film could really have done without having to rely on to provide the usual tension. You have the rough, tough but intelligent leader, for example, with the traditional psychotic brother who’s just not very smart and would rather be “the head bad guy” and do nasty stuff which you know would get all the main protagonists in danger... not the most original way to keep the tension going... although I have seen it work very well just recently (see my review of Lockout right here). Then you have the friend of the brother who is almost-but-not-quite-so-psychotic as the brother and who eggs the character on just when he’s about to do something really stupid while everyone else is telling him not too.

Then you have the good guy who promises the chief mourner at the funeral that he’ll get everybody back safely (a promise he fails to keep within the first ten minutes) and also you have the “this person is supposed to be on our side but, serously, you should watch out for them” character... who seems to be kinda tacked on in terms of her motivation. As do all the characters in fact.

I haven’t figured out quite why I didn’t love The Horde as yet, but the whole film just seemed to be a little lacking in something to me. I even felt there was a lack of explanation for the situation our heroes and villains soon find themselves in but I can’t, taking into account the post-Romero zombie model oeuvre of on-screen, undead shenanigans, even really justify that attitude in myself... since I clearly don’t have a rotted, zombified husk of a leg to stand on in that regards. What I mean by that is...

Just when the few surviving “good guys” are about to be “dead guys” in the first ten/fifteen minutes or so of the movie... the bad guys are distracted from their task by the corpse of a former victim getting up to take a bite out of anyone he can get a hold of. After the zombie has been dispatched with a shotgun to the head (and believe me, even though they finally work out what kills a zombie, it takes these idiots a long time to connect the concept of lack of brain with lack of electrical impulses... sheesh!), the good guys and bad guys alike go out onto the roof of the building and see the world around them being wiped out by zombie hordes. My first thought was... “Really? Why? That’s absurd” because the whole zombie thing suddenly just seemed like a pointless “deus ex machina” to get our two factions working together to fight an outside threat.

Now I know I should not have had that reaction because, as I implied earlier, the classic Romero zombie movies have never (as far as I can remember), given any explanation as to why there are suddenly zombies everywhere... and it’s never bothered me before. But you know what... at least those movies start off with that premise in tact or at least hint that there are hordes of undead things on the move. Even in Romero’s original Night Of The Living Dead, the dead were already lumbering into view in the background before even the main characters were properly established.  And that’s what The Horde is missing in my opinion. Because you are already deeply entrenched in a different plot line and when the zombies start to show up without even having been established in a few long shots at an earlier point in the action... it just feels a little bit like a cheat. Even the well received zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead had a few little shots of strange zombie sightings mixed in to build expectations before the zombie holocaust started proper.

The Horde, foolishly eschews such intimate and, in this case I feel, necessary foreplay to instead use the surprise element of a corpse rising from the dead to stimulate the audience. Except this tactic will always fall down, of course, because the paying audience already know they are here to see a zombie movie... and so are expecting that very thing to happen at some point in the movie anyway. Not a good call as far as I’m concerned.

What else?

Well the characters are played by some really decent actors (What else would you expect from a French movie?) but the trouble is, from what I can see, that they have nothing to work with. The script seems to really stumble because, lets face it, guns and zombies in a block of flats? No brainer for a brilliant time at the cinema. The script starts from a great premise but is hamstrung by being quite badly and sketchily written. Granted, this is a zombie movie here (and, trust me, I love watching zombie movies) and it’s not supposed to be Shakespeare... but this scripting shows that you have to have some semblance of talent to make these kinds of yarns work right. The Horde, I think, suffers from not having enough interesting things happening in it... it mostly just relies on different factions of the main “protagonist group” shouting at each other punctuated by the odd break of body-count, zombie slaughter. It just didn’t work for me.

So there you go... not got too much more to say about this movie to be honest... other than I was glad it only cost me £3 in a sale. It’s by no means a terrible movie... and the action scenes are handled (or at least edited) competently... I’m just a little bit down on it, I think, because I wasn’t expecting either a) a zombie movie or b) a French film, to be this disappointing. There are better genre movies than this one to sink your teeth into but, if you can see it cheap and you like zombie/action movies... then there are much worse examples of the genre out there too.