Review by Ben Bussey
Mild spoiler alert, on the off-chance anyone’s going to give a monkeys about this movie: that image you see above of the guy in an orange jumpsuit holding an axe as he psyches himself up to take on the onslaught of zombies about to burst through the glass doors? That’s the final shot of Zombie Resurrection. There, now you know how it ends, so it’s obviously not worth you seeing this film now.
Believe me, I just saved you 80 minutes of your life.
I’ve said it time and again: as much as we at Brutal As Hell strive to be champions of microbudget independent horror, as much as we hold it up as the crucible of genuine passion, creativity and individuality in a genre so often underserved by the mainstream – by Jupiter’s cock, they don’t half make it hard for us to maintain that position at times. I’ve already spewed vitriol over one bargain basement British horror comedy this year – Crying Wolf – and I’ve no wish to do the same again, but Zombie Resurrection falls into so many of the same pitfalls (though, not that it makes the slightest difference, we might note that Zombie Resurrection was in fact made two years earlier). Taking a stock premise and an oversized ensemble of stock characters – not one among them even remotely likeable on any level – the debut feature from co-directors Jake Hawkins and Andy Phelps takes us up a path we’ve trod a great many times before, but evidently said path has been pissed on quite a lot in the interim.
It doesn’t start badly, to be fair, opening on an actually quite impressive first-person-shooter night vision shot as we see through the visor of a lone soldier making a sneak attack in woodland. Alas, it isn’t long before said gunman is out of the picture in a chompy fashion, and we learn we’re in a near-future Britain which has been overrun by zombies, and meet our protagonists, a (cough) hilariously mismatched bunch of survivors: excessively chavvy woman, excessively middle-class man, excessively upper-class soldier, excessively foul-mouthed working class Scottish soldier, excessively religious African woman… you get the picture. They’re all a bunch of painfully broad stereotypes who clearly think playing everything at pantomime levels is going to prompt LOLs aplenty. I suspect you can already ascertain whether or not I feel they succeeded in this.
Anyway, after wandering in the woods for a painfully long time talking way too much, they wind up finding an abandoned school, venturing inside, and continuing to talk way too much, making sure they say “fuck” and “cunt” a lot because that makes them all seem cool and edgy. Quel surprise, there turn out to be way more zombies in there than there were outside – but oh wait, could they be on the brink of some astonishing discovery that forever changes their understanding of the zombie outbreak…? Well, maybe. And if you get invested enough in the story and the characters that you actually give a flying toss, well, good for you I suppose. For myself, the only revelation I was anxious for was the end credits.
There are attempts at something interesting in Zombie Resurrection, as in its own hamfisted way it attempts to tackle the religious implications of the dead returning to life, and come the final act it does make efforts to get a bit in your face with gore, craziness and stuff that might offend the oversensitive. Ultimately though, it only succeeds in offending the sensibilities of anyone who likes horror comedies to actually be a bit funny, a bit scary, and enjoyable to watch. A failure on all counts, Zombie Resurrection really should have just stayed dead.
Zombie Resurrection is released on UK DVD and Blu-ray on 23rd March 2015, from Left Films.