I'll preface this by saying that the theater I was in had about 80% of it empty, and the other 20% were pretentious film snobs/horror snobs who snickered at every little line, so that took away a bit of the fun for me.
At the same time of my showing there was a Midnight screening for The Shining, which had about 15x the amount of people in their theater.
As I was walking out, I overheard a girl whisper to her (boy)friend, "The movie would've been a lot better if there wasn't any dialogue."
The first 20-30 minutes or so, there isn't any, and it was shaping up to be the finest zombie film in about 30 years. The film does nothing groundbreaking, there's not really too many new elements they introduce, and they stick to the book regarding most zombie lore. If I had to, I'd say it's a cross of Serpent and the Rainbow x Day of the Dead x 28 Days Later.
It was Serpent and the Rainbow in the obvious sense of it taking place in Africa, it was Day of the Dead with the climax and some of the dialogue, and 28 Days Later in a sense of people looking for salvation elsewhere. It also had some elements of Zombie too, which makes sense.
Before I get into any spoilers, the films about a military crew who crashes while aboard a plane, and the engineer on the plane is the only survivor, and he meets up with an African soldier who wants to find his boy who was saved by a rescue crew and taken north to a salvation camp.
SPOILERS.
The opening scene kind of ruins 95% of the movie. If you pay attention, which I happened to, you'll notice what's going to happen, and you're anticipating what's going to happen.
The movie looks gorgeous. It's got some grain to it, but at times it's a little too dark, and it was shot on film, not digital. And maybe it was just my indy theater, but the sound system was on way too loud. The mixing was a bit off at times, there would be dialogue going on while the background noise was killing the entire scene. I don't know if that's my theaters fault, or just a rough audio mix.
The movie starts off with Brian in the desert, as I said, basically setting up the rest of the movie. What's he doing? How did he get there? That's the movie about to unfold. We're then thrown into the plane which he survived. I really liked that scene; if it weren't so noisy and hectic, it might be the best scene in the film. No other zombie film that I can think of plays with the emotions of having to kill someone you love. They do here, and it's intense and thrilling. It feels rushed in a sense, but it's a scene where we actually see some real emotion by good actors, and it's all very in your face. The forthcoming zombie assault on the village was also very well done, I'd say probably my favorite scene in the film. Chaos reigns. It's very organized and well-shot, and well-directed. Until this point, there's been very little dialogue between characters, and when there is, it's done very well. If you watch the first 30 minutes, you'd think this was one of the best zombie films you'd ever seen.
And then the lead opens his mouth. It's not that the script is TERRIBLE, it's pretty bad, but it's still not the worst script you've ever seen, but it's amplified because of the performance of the actor. He's a great physical actor. When it's just him on screen, or with zombies, or playing out the scene, he's very sufficient. But when he starts to have a conversation with someone, you get the sense that he'd never talked to anyone older than nine years old before. A lot of his comments are meant to have some wit to them, but he's just never subtle and it comes off strangely, often making the horror snobs giggle with glee. The other leader is actually a much better actor and was far more believable as far as making a character is concerned. His lines aren't any better, but his delivery is much better.
Whenever villagers talked with one another, they seemed fine, it's just whenever the lead actor ever said anything, it just seemed so off, both in terms of the script and delivery.
The movie delved into the religious effects of the zombie outbreak, and that's when the resemblance of John's scene from Day of the Dead sprung to mine. Call it ripping it off, call it a homage, but one of the elders of one of the villages spit out the same speech John did, just changing the words. The context was exactly the same. God is punishing us for what we did to his land, and we are at his mercy. It wasn't bad, but it was clear where they got their source material.
Some parts just don't really make sense at all. This isn't a slasher and we're supposed to believe that these guys are somewhat logical people, but yet both of them seemingly love to go into dark, narrow corridors where their flashlight always seems to die. The one downer about this film is it relies a lot on jump scares to try and spook the audience, which I'm not too fond of. Let the movie be, you don't have to try and scare the audience every 5 minutes. Also there's a scene where the lead takes a baby away from a soon-to-be-zombie, and literally about 30 seconds later, he finds a rescue van, puts the baby on it, and watches the van ride into the sunset, after he had been traveling on foot for a few days without food-and-water, with a treacherous hike still to go. Why didn't he just hop into the van too? Beats me, I would have though.
The gore was top-notch in this though. There were some scenes of CGI, but it wasn't as obvious and low-budget as GAR's recent efforts. This film puts Diary and Survival in it's dust, and maybe even Land too if you can get over it's poor script. The movie has a lot going on without there being too much dialogue. The film lets the pictures make the movie, not the dialogue. Some shots were some of the better CGI gunshots I've seen. They weren't completely over the the top, but they were damn good and gory. Some of the head-smashes also looked pretty gruesome, a few made me wince a bit.
The zombies themselves were very creepy. I've never been "afraid," of zombies, and I probably never will, but these guys just looked eerie. It was the minimalist make-up with the contact lenses that did it for me. You don't have tons of decay on these guys. You just have fresh wounds, slow-movement, and creepy eyes. Combined with the gore and the cinematography, it was easily the best part of the film. I don't know if zombies have ever looked better, I really like the way they were achieved in this one. They reminded me of touched-up, creepier looking NOTLD-remake zombies, which were always my favorite.
The film isn't without it's flaws, but if you can ignore it for 100 minutes, it's some of the best stuff you'll ever see in terms of zombie films. Like I said before, it doesn't break any new ground, but it's definitely a film made for genre fans. Not too many nods to other films, that would take away from the reality of the situation, but it's source material is straight out of the GAR zombie-work. And he'd be proud to have this follow his lore.
Zombies in Africa. I dig it.
