Undead
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The
plot in a nutshell
A small town in Australia is hit with a big problem - a meteor shower turns normal folk into the walking dead. It that's not bad enough, aliens drop by to join the party.
This starts out as a fairly standard zombie film, with a handful of folks banding together at a house to survive the attack, but takes a twist that's rather interesting.
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Relatively
Spoiler Free Thoughts
Most zombie film fans tend to also enjoy good campiness. The two simply go hand in hand, since zombies tend to bring out the goofiness. This low budget Australian film is definitely campy, but has a fairly interesting plot that will keep you engaged.
That is, if you can get past the acting. Think Evil Dead acting, without Bruce Campbell. The survivor party includes two cops, doing their very best Barney Fife imitations, a pregnant waitress and her man, an outback pilot, and our two main characters, the town beauty queen, looking to get out of town long before the zombies show up, and the town crazy, who's been abducted before, and
conveniently once owned "Marion's World of Weapons". Needless to say I suppose that he has a lot of weapons, which seem to pop from some of the most unusual places whenever he needs them.
The lead actress, Felicity Mason, has some seriously striking blue eyes, but it seems that her only direction in this film was to look at everyone, zombie or not, as though they had just farted in church. The lead, Mungo McKay, only other major acting gig was a bit part in Inspector Gadget 2. Enough said. He definitely looks more like a Mungo than a Marion.
The script is fairly standard stuff for two thirds of the film, and there's plenty of zombie gore. People blown in half, brains ripped from heads - at one point, it looks as though two guys with 10 gallon buckets of blood simply through them across a car windshield. It's become a standard in zombie films to be as bloody and gross as possible, so Undead gives it a shot.
I wouldn't say there's a 'twist' in this film, just that the story is interesting, and might be going in a slightly different direction than you first expect. But it isn't some sort of hidden twist or tacked on ending, and the idea is interesting enough that I could see this getting redone at some point - or a similar film being done - with better actors. I also suspect that the directing twin brothers, the Spierigs, will end up doing much larger films very soon.
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Rating - Qualified Rent It.
If you're a fan of the zombie genre, check it out. It's not classic cinema by any means, and won't end up on any top ten lists, but it's good fun with plenty of gore and an interesting script. Also don't expect to be terrified - this isn't a horror movie in the traditional sense, and there's not a whole lot of tension, since the zombies follow a fairly standard pattern. Still, you could find a lot worse films to blow an hour and a half on.
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Spoiler Laden Thoughts
Ah, yes, there are things to spoil...
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I usually can see this kind of stuff coming, but I have to admit that I didn't catch on until the heroine did. The fact that flyboy escaped and was going to
re-infect the population was pretty obvious, but I have to admit that I enjoyed the visual at the end. All those zombies caged up was like a reverse version of Land of the Dead, and worked for me.
In case you didn't get what was going on - and if you didn't, really, you need to pay more attention - the meteor brought with it a virus which kills you and turns you into a super zombie. Those hit with the rocks were infected immediately, but the virus was airborne (and why they were coughing) and would kill them all and turn them into zombies as well. The aliens were the good guys, sort of like the cosmic version of the Center for Disease Control. They quarantined off the infected area, and the rain killed the virus in those infected, bringing them back to life. If you hadn't suffered injuries that would prove fatal during your infection, the rain cured you.
Our friend the idiot in the plane managed to allude them though, and they didn't realize they'd missed someone. They raised them into the air when cured to 'count' them, I'd assume, making sure they were all free of infection, but since he flew up there, he went undetected. Once he went into general population, he spread the virus, which zombified everyone quite quickly.
I like that she stays with the town to take care of them, fulfilling her beauty queen obligations. I also like that the aliens were the good guys for a change, and that the assumption of evil on their part took you down the wrong path. Like I said, this isn't classic cinema, but it's a fun watch.
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