Joey
The movie starts off in the Red Crow Indian Reservation in the year 1981. Not long into the movie it starts to follow the script for almost every zombie movie before it. Animals start to get infected and soon it spreads to off screen reports about people attacking and biting other people. Just like clockwork we’re eventually shown our first onscreen attack. Followed by numerous other encounters, bringing us into full on zombie outbreak territory. Again, nothing new.
This is where the movie tries to take a different turn. A number of the characters that have been set up as our main cast are bitten. Leaving us to believe that they soon will become a member of the undead, but in this case you would be wrong.
All this set up and eventual carnage takes place roughly in the first thirty minutes of a movie that clocks in at an hour and thirty-seven minutes. After the thirty-minute mark the movie displays that it now jumped six months into the future. Whatever momentum this movie was building in the first thirty minutes, promptly hits the brakes at this point.
In this second act we are shown a world that has fallen into anarchy. Like every other zombie movie, the surviving members have built a wall and barricaded all entrances into their community. Again, another play straight out of the zombie movie playbook. But, before we get to comfortable, they throw another twist our way, we see that the established main characters that were bit in the first act are still alive and well, but how can this be?
No official explanation as to why these people are immune to the virus is ever given, but for what the writer/director is going for its soon established that no official explanation is required. This is when the movie starts to lay the groundwork that Caucasian people are the true virus on their society, and it attempts to illustrate the negative affect they have had on the Aboriginal culture. This would be an interesting new take on an otherwise exhausted genre of horror, if only it had stayed the course. Unfortunately for this movie all it proceeds to do in this second act is paint a number of its main and supporting cast in a negative tone. It just shows them drinking and doing drugs more than anything. During this time the movie falls right into another overused zombie movie concept; that it’s the survivors you need to worry about more than the walking dead.
The third act follows one of our main characters assuming the ‘kill them all” mentality. This is where the movie truly loses any message it had been trying to convey. It quickly resumes taking plays out of the how to make a zombie movie playbook. The rest of the movie plays out like any other zombie movie and never really comes back from this point; all meaning lost in a sea of senseless gore and violence.
I wish I could say with its social message that it stands out from the crowd, but unfortunately it does not. This is a movie where once the credits start to roll you already start to forget what you just watched. If you’re a fan of anything zombie related, then by all means check it out. It definitely has a number of gory and graphic scenes to appease you. But, if your tired of cookie cutter zombie movies than this movie is one you should skip. If you’ve seen one zombie movie, then you have seen this movie already.
