*Luckily, however,
the movie doesn't spend too much time on the leader's sense of guilt for all those who
have died while under way.
Zombie
Apocalypse is a bit low on the known names phoning
in a rent-paying performance, the only truly familiar face (to us and/or at the time of its filming) being Ving
Rhames doing his typically stoic man's man, named Henry, whose favorite weapon
for dealing with zombies is a sledge hammer. For that, it is one of the rare
Asylum films to have a face that has gone on to do bigger things: Ramona, the
whiny blonde that you hope will die but who never does, is played by Taryn Manning, seen below not from the movie,
who has gained some recognition in the US at least for her stints on Hawaii 5-0 and Orange Is the New Black. In any event, the acting in the movie
can't be really be criticized: everyone does well enough, and since an
inordinate amount of time is spent on character development, you sort of get to
like a couple of them.
Ramona (Manning) is one of the first characters to be introduced in Zombie
Apocalypse, one of three friends that at the outbreak of the virus took
refuge in a mountain cabin and, weeks later, are forced to return to the ruins
of civilization in search for food. Of course, being as stupid as they are
hungry, they make way too much noise trying to get at a few candy bars and are
attacked by zombies, which means the early departure of the non-character Kevin
(Gerald Webb, who is supposedly seen somewhere in Camel Spiders [2012]).
Luckily Henry, Mack, Romona and Julien (Johnny Pacar) show up to save Romona
and the dude with hipster bad hair (Eddie Steeples as "Billy"), and
the rest of the film is spent following the rag-tag group of survivors as they
make their way to the coast of San Pedro in the hope of catching a legendary
ferry to the legendary island of survivors, Catalina Island. (How the ferry
should work after all the EMPs at the start of the film is never broached in the
movie.)
Even before the housing-market meltdown a
few years ago, Los Angeles had more than enough deserted housing projects perfect for a movie
like this: the abandoned and overgrown housing estates work well representing a
world gone dead. (For comparison of such abandoned projects, now to earlier days, take a
gander at the old non-zombie exploiter, Suburbia
[1984 / trailer].)
In general — and unlike Lyon's follow-up Rise
of the Zombies — Zombie Apocalypse exploits
its urban locations well, whether a strip mall or downtown Los Angeles, and
this does a lot to make the movie work. It's a shame the script just wasn't a
bit tighter, and the abundant CGI a little better. There's a scene involving a
machine gun, for example, that totally forgets that the gun was left blocks
behind the good guys trapped in the house, and the whole bit in the deserted
high-school "safe haven" defies normal intelligence — really: you know
it's a zombie apocalypse, but you wander around a body-strewn "safe
haven" yelling "Hello? Anyone alive here?" until the hoards of
un-dead come running? Makes you wonder how any of them got as far as they did
in the first place. Also, we can't help but notice the scriptwriters'
fascination with certain bodily functions: first, the need to pee is used for
some character and friendship building between the ladies, and another character later meets his
end basically because he's obsessed with finally being able to sit down on a
toilet (in this case, a Johnny-on-the-Spot). Did a German write the script?
Zombie
Apocalypse does briefly touch upon three things seldom seen in other zombie movies, all new concepts of varying viability for future
inclusion in the zombie cannon. The most interesting one is that the zombies
are getting more intelligent as time goes on, to the point of setting traps or
running at the sight of guns.* (The development of intelligence, however, is
uneven, so if the zombies run from guns in one scene, they don't in the next.)
*OK, one finds
this in Romero's later movies as well, but I can't remember if they go as far
as to set traps.
The last new aspect is one also seen and mentioned in Silent Night, Zombie Night
(2009): not all zombies are created equal — in ZA, there are the normal shambling dead and "runners". As there is a direct reference to this difference in ZA, unlike in Nick Lyon's follow-up zombie flick, Rise of the Zombies — in which all zombies are obviously likewise not created equal — the zombies of varying speeds don't come across as a directorial oversight. As a result, the mixing of the classic shambler with the modern speedster doesn't jar all that much.
We enjoyed director's Lyon's later Rise of the Zombies for what it was: a
laughably crappy movie. Zombie Apocalypse,
however, is a bit less easy to simply dismiss as crappy. It may not really be a
good movie — it has way too many flaws to be anything more than second rate — but is also not really a laughably terrible
movie: for all the balls it drops, it also catches too many to simply be dismissed
as a lost cause or hilarious example of bad filmmaking. As a TV movie, it
really isn't all that terrible, and it is actually better than the way too many disappointing episodes of its inspiration, The Walking Dead. (As a DVD release, however, Zombie Apocalypse arguably also lacks the added
requirements of gratuitous nudity, but then, most films do nowadays.)
Zombie
Apocalypse is, perhaps, simply what it is: generic,
low budget zombie movie, nothing spectacularly good or bad, but OK for a zombie
fix if one is needed. A flick for zombie completists, in other words, and not
horror movie fans.
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