Reviews

The opening was really cool.

Taxpayer funded "creativity" (Creative Scotland, a bunch of leaches, a jobs program for connected kids) that is basically a confession of the classist assumptions of the crappy writers themselves; another small town full of evil charicature people who all have this or that evil secret (Of course they do! After all, they're from a small town! One slip away from giving away their deep evil and Not One of them is redeemable - remember, the main character is from Out of town of course) and its up to our urbane magic man to straighten them out. What could appeal more to a certain type...

Bile from above and they didn't even pay for it all themselves.

A more thoughtful zombie flick without being full of insufferable characters who force you to begin asking yourself "am I a bad person for hoping the zombies get these folks sooner rather than later?" and "God when are the zombies going to tear out some breakfast sausages?".

When the honourable guard dude (spoiler) .

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Succumbs to the infection we actually said "Damm I wanted that guy to make it" and then "wow how rare lately in these kinds of movies for them to have actually developed their characters well and not make them all a bunch of annoying edgy whiners".

Good acting, good kills, intelligently written in quite a few spots, some great shots/setting, not an overindulgence of jump scares; we were pleasantly surprised overall.

For a zombie/horror flick it's an 8 for me, giving it 10 to push up this average ;)

Get to handle these things, various popular franchises that they somehow manage to fumble and ruin with their drug-addled brains and weird senses of humour (the music scenes in this one for example). They can't even make a zombie film that practically writes itself from the game material due them constantly coming down and having to spike back up again.. or scheduling time with another sex worker or whatever these jokers do.. stressful edgy argumentative dialogue wore me out dude I just started skipping things which was a good call since hardly anything happens for long stretches at a time, and when they do happen they're mostly so-so.

You might want to put this on in the background , or go take a dump or something.

I would give it a 4 maybe but wow 6.1... and some of these reviews are hilarious I must say, even another reviewer wrote they didn't know wtf movie these 10/10 reviewers saw. It had potential but we ended up just groaning a lot, and almost falling asleep five times even though it was only 8pm. Low budget or not it just didn't have enough meat on its bones.

During some of the drama I found myself unconvinced, ambivalent, and almost annoyed while predicting roughly how many minutes I thought we'd be bogged down for the scene to make its obvious points. We get it yes you want us to dislike the cop, here we go again with the pills scene and the gaslighting scenes and the extended shots of the main character walking around looking... looking... haha Looking Some More.. I mean will someone please just have that dude in the hooded robe chase her around or something instead of this paint by numbers pseudo drama.

Definitely need to watch the original to appreciate this gem. When it clicked for me that the gay dude was playing the hysterical woman and that this seemed to be a remake... honestly that guy did a great job in the role and I laughed so many times in this movie (the two shots of him running/sashaying through the field haha were brilliant). The movie is a lot of fun and it channels the essence of the original quite well if you overlook a few things.

I didn't find it really trying to say too much about anything too political if you know how the roles were played in the original. You will encounter a couple of hilarious nude shots that will probably shock but I didn't think they held them for too long. Still, wang and butthole alert haha just warning you.

For the genre I felt they did a solid job with the kills ect. The zombies aren't supposed to run like in World War Z so you have to keep that in mind. There were some excellent performances by several in this movie (not all) that were pleasantly surprising, impressive even.

Again it's not for everyone but I had fun watching and yes I'll say it I thought the gay dude's hysterics were hilarious and actually quite well calibrated/performed by the actor - not too much or little.

I got a little worried about how insufferably unbelievable the characters might become when our young hero picked a lock almost instantly... after we'd learned they were a professor in London with 2 phds, black belt in krav magna iirc, spoke 6 languages "4 of them dead" (not kidding) - probably had the cure for cancer scribbled out on a napkin somewhere waiting under the notebook in which they'd solved fusion power's issues in their spare time when sitting on a toilet dropping a duece (just kidding)... meeting her ex inside a church he'd broken into himself to fix an old clock (not kidding).

The French characters finally injected some levity and fresh air into the stinky atmosphere.

Some of it was quite good eventually. Great premise/atmosphere, solid final 15-20 mins, not all jump scares some were set up well, definitely some clever ideas here and there, depending on your taste not too bad late night time killer if you don't quite feel like going to bed.

Not nearly the Brain Wave some on here seem to think it is. Not bad but not particularly good. Not actually very Horrifying or Thrilling, only gory and flirting with torture porn.

9/10 times "subverting expectations" is a cloak for mediocrity, yet in our increasingly stupid times it's somehow elevated to the deeply profound just because it sounds cooler than it really is. HR Buzzword Bingo BS, incoherence rebranded as genius.

The film collapsed 3/4 in in breathtaking fashion, but it was a planned collapse at least. It almost got slapstick for a minute.

Possibly as a moutpiece for the writers themselves the audience recieves a lecture about society and violence, from an unhinged mass murderer no less (protip, not the best spokesman). The implication seemed to be that he's just doing yeoman work due to the demand. I groaned at how stupid it was, like a coke addict lecturing folks about smoking the occasion joint.

All security conveniently evaporated and the girl regains the upper hand, then it ends on an over the top artsy fartsy note.

This one was slow and not nearly as cerebral as some may insist. You watch a family collapse under supernatural pressures for 90 minutes and the girl goes off to join the satanic witches, the end. Just a drawn out downer.

Seemed to start as a comedy/horror (something about the early security guard scene killed me) but eventually hit a wide range of emotions. Fresh story ideas. Likeable characters. Some frustrations here and there but overall we were very entertained.

The cynics who put this out obviously knew to show us the adult protagonists we've come to expect.

They throw us a deceptive bone at the start and then quickly move us into a completely different highschool drama story with little girls as the protagonists and bullying and all the predictable filler crap to waste our time and try to drum up some pathos.

After watching the hapless babysitter's uninvited friend manipulate and snoop around the house for 30 mins, penetrating all the feeble security (yes yes all the locks but keys lying around on a desk) we realized maybe the adults aren't coming back... so we cut our losses and so should you.

Genius! There were some absolutely hilarious moments in this bad boy. I wanted to give it a 10 but there's no excuse for the little boy not turning into a zombie. My personal favourite so-bad-it's-good moment was when the cop barely got any rounds off with his assault rifle but the ones he did get off broke the hardened glass protecting the family - then he got summarily swarmed and killed, what a champion!

It can be frustrating but it's also a gem or a crap zombie movie with some of the amazing fails. Enjoy!

It was showing troubling signs of weakness early on but we hung in there for the mayhem to begin because it is shot well. I'll ignore the part about an entire camp, including a dog, being stealthily removed in the night.

Unfortunately I feel the need to nerd-out about a few of the things the audience is asked to go along with.

The story spent some time hyping the soldier brother as some kind of badass discharged under murky circumstances. He tells some campfire story about how he'd always do so well against all the other kids back when they'd play some shooting game in the forest. He mentions how his dog saved his life many times (but the dog turns out to be completely useless guarding the camp btw - did the dog get hammered too?). One of the psycho teens kills his dog, hangs it from a tree as bait, and then misses the brother with a couple of scoped rifle rounds while supersoldier stood in possibly the most exposed spot he could. Then bro takes cover, improvises a weapon, sneaks over, and gets the upper hand in close combat.

Here is where things got even more astonishing, way beyond "suspend your disbelief and just have fun" into "have you seen the Russian slapping competitions? Here's one right across the face of your intelligence".

Having gotten the upper hand over the man who butchered his dog, hung it's body as bait, and just attempted to murder him, the ex-soldier bashes the back of the psycho teen's skull five hard times with the butt of a rifle. He announces that since the psycho killed his dog he was going to kill him (nevermind that the killer's head should have been mush already). He then inexplicably does what all hardened soldiers do and turns his back for some time on the man he hasn't confirmed is dead. Cue a cheesy "bad guy rises vertically behind character" moment and that was the end of soldier bro. I wondered if the mask was really a full helmet under the hood, but later you see clearly all of them have no protection in the back besides the straps.

I mentally checked out after that kill but I did get a laugh when the weak-but-now-strong female character turned full assassin much later on. Rising to the occasion is a good theme but this time they had to rely on even more nonsensical situations to advance their agenda.

What exactly happened with that flare ambush? The three psychos see the flares and advance towards the smoke. Apparently only one psycho actually goes in to search for her for some reason. She takes him out in almost a single blow, hesitates, then finishes him after he pulls his sidearm. She drops to her knees and is tired/feels bad for a bit.

Remember, only one psycho went in to her ambush. I'm asked to believe in the next scene she had time to beat the other psycho (who is conveniently alone as well now) to another location and set a fresh ambush (that includes activating all the museum's electronic features.) She doesn't bother to have the rifle ready to fire though, so we're treated to the additional drama of a scuffle.

How will she get the third psycho? Another favourable one-on-one ambush of course! Nice of them to largely reverse their team tactics for her convenience. This time psycho #3 fails to see her on a branch a couple of feet above his head which gives her the opportunity to perform an outlandish maneuver I will not describe because it was the funniest moment in the movie and I'd hate to ruin it.

Good times.

Fun dialogue at times, some of the jokes were funny.

A little slow moving at times.

Good acting though it did degenerate into shaky (too much) screaming and running at the end.

A little short/quick on the actual scares though some of the ideas were good.

I actually didn't hate these characters. Some reviewers are harsh on them (one guy called the girls "passable", my my what princely standards) because they were partying college kids but a lot of the joshing was good-natured and not some of the inexplicably rude dialogue you see sometimes.

Lastly, it got and stayed too shaky sometimes, especially near the end. Some of the extended shaky running scenes had me feeling the potential of a headache come on but it would juust end in time.

Eighty plus minutes of watching a guy's life decay in just about every way possible only to get a feeble ex post facto ending.

Why would interstellar aliens need to study people using human marine biology techniques (the silly ending's attempt at justifying just so much drivel).

The film is well made technically but it suffers from some deranged morality and a few massive plot holes. You can only suspend your disbelief so much for a movie that doesn't involve the supernatural or futuristic technology or a fun dive straight into the absurd/gratuitous/slapstick/satirical.

It's more thriller than horror, though there is a mortifying scene involving a turkey baster.

The film has a major likeability problem with all of its characters, though the blind vet's problem is so titanically contrived it asks the audience far too much. How exactly did this blind man pull it off? He'a a vet, so sure he's got skills, but come on man. I feel that desperate twist, turkey baster and all, was shoehorned in when someone influential in a bs buzzword bingo meeting went on about "subverting expectations" - code for "I'm well connected so here I am on this project despite being largely a mediocre judge of good storytelling".

Had the movie not bothered setting up dubious moral justifications (a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to get to California from Michigan) I wouldn't bother examining it so much, but it's the creators' very strange decisions that leave me wondering if they are simply a bit off in their heads.

They could have done so many other things to make the blind man less pure (maybe he shot a bunch of innocent folks while on a rampage working for Blackwater in Iraq) but they chose an outlandish route, including some cheap psychopathic relativism masquerading as hard-won philosophy for good measure. Then they beat you over the head with naked continuity problems, often involving the dog (by then the only likeable character for the sane viewer, bravo!).

How about the time when the vet punches the boy out after a struggle in the workshop and then reaches for the shears to finish him off? How exactly did the blind vet (who until that moment was very proficient) mistake the positioning of the man he was just punching and plunge the shears into the other body that was lying around? That was to set up another absurdity later on when the boy wakes up and begins to enter the hallway only to see the dog watching the doorway. The dog charges at him, the boy clearly dodges back inside the room, the dog follows him in and then POOF the boy magically appears outside of the room somehow behind a door that he uses to lock the dog inside the room with. Meanwhile, some awful - and awfully unnecessary - things are about to happen in the basement but apparently instead of barking its ass off the dog took a nap and so the now-bad-as-well vet hears nothing to warn him. It wasn't the first nor would it be the last time that the dog pops in and out of existence when the increasingly weak story needed a boost or a crutch. How did the blind guy forget his dog in the car? The same dog whose barking he followed to locate the damn car??

Cheap parlour tricks and the subconscious nihlistic confessions of the film's depraved creators combine with a handful of genuinely good scenes to leave the final product a busted flush in the end.

The western horror appeal eventually fades and you're left with a slowly paced, somewhat incoherent film. A pity since it started off well but was ultimately just a big fat downer.

Near the end the dubious hero had two horses then suddenly he's down to one. Fine, maybe he switched and set the other one free, maybe the writers forgot, a three second scene would have clarified that and taught people some trivia about fresh horses. Then he luckily encounters the military party, oh except it was Another military party Besides the one the audience had been introduced too. This allows the original military party to somehow magically find its way to the location of the final battle before the hero's party returns there, presumably at his direction. This somehow happens even though the last time the audience sees the original military party the civilian team had broken off, travelling ninety degrees in a different heading. This completely unforshadowed event slaps the audience across the face so the producers/writers can shoehorn in an opportunity to club the audience over the head with some hamfisted moralizing.

The moralizing wouldn't be so bad if it hadn't been so clumbsily tacked-on. The ending is awful, I called BS and cursed the director for blowing the lead so badly.

I wanted to like it and due to my soft spot for Butler (This... Is... Sparta!!) I can't drop it lower than a 6, but unfortunately this script leaned heavily on some familiar writer's crutches. It was downright annoying in many places. A script-by-numbers kind of plot where a few familiar ideas are "explored", or rather regurgitated. And it was a little light on the actual disaster moments.

We've got the troubled marraige thing that my SO and I immediately groaned about once we realized it was going to be a major theme in the movie. At this point that stuff is just modern low-hanging fruit - fake depth - and in 2012 John Cusack already patched it up in a similar crisis (that delivered more in the visual candy department btw). This movie doesn't say anything new on that file either. Busy husband neglects wife, wife doesn't appreciate all he's doing, he cheats (might as well ratchet it up), now there's tension. Fortunately, the extemes of a cataclysmic event help them rediscover their bonds, aided by an excessive amount of happy-time flashbacks just in case the audience is too dense to discern the obvious.

After establishing the troubled-marraige crutch the writers move to the next crutch, the diabetic kid crutch. My SO had wondered aloud before that moment if we were going to get someone with asthma or a pregnant woman, so it was a good laugh when diabetic kid was introduced. Yep, sure enough we get those insulin panic scenes yadiyadiyada.

I should wrap this up but I want to mention one more thing.

The writers seem to think that people in Canada are so nice they'd give up their seats/endanger their own families for some entitled American family charging their plane on the tarmac. It's as though there wasn't a lottery/selection process Here as well and it's tough luck for those left out, but if an affluent American family shows up we'll all be deferential to them. Canada exists merely as a prop to the writers, they do their little "hello from X,Y, Z locations" at the end but of course not from Canada, even though the big impact happens around the Mediterranean. What idiocy. It may come as some surprise but we have a highly capable and professional military here, too, except we don't devote nearly as much per-capita to chimpanzee-level nonsense like 'full spectrum domination" then wonder why there's nothing left for a social safety net.

Anyway, that was the icing on the cake for a script written for solipsistic affluent Americans I suppose. I least there was a few explosions.