28 Days Later...

A group of animal rights activists breaks into a lab to free chimpanzees, that are being used for testing. Although the cause is noble, the activists are about to unleash a epidemic on the population of Great Britain. A lab technician walks in on them and, realizing what they are about to do, warns them that the animals were infected with the dangerous and highly infectious 'Rage' virus. Ignoring this, they open one cage and the chimpanzee storms out and immediately attacks a woman, biting her neck. Within seconds, the infection sets in and the woman's eyes turn red with this it starts.

28 days after this, Jim awakes in a hospital, where he was in a coma after a head injury suffered in a car crash. The hospital is empty and - as Jim walks out, wearing scrubs - so apparently is the entire city of London. He stumbles around, calling out and really only starts to understand the gravity of the situation when he finds an old newspaper with unsettling headlines. Soon enough, he encounters the first group of infected, in a church. They run after him (them things are fast) and he is saved by two young people, Mark and Selena.

They group up and after visiting Jim's parent's house, where he finds his parents in bed, having committed suicide some time ago, they are again attacked by infected. Again, they get away but Mark was infected through an open wound. Selena beats his head in. Traveling on through the city, the two survivors see blinking Christmas lights in a high rise, where they go and meet Frank and his daughter Hannah. After spending a night in relative safety, Frank plays them a recording, informing the population of a safe haven up the country some way. The group decides to make a break for it.

When they come to the spot, the road block appears to be abandoned. Frank, in a rage, kicks against the wall of a lean to, that has a bloody body on top. A drop of blood falls right into his eye, infecting him (all this in a pretty shot from the blood drops point of view). While Frank turns, military shows up to shoot the hell out of him. Jim, Selena and Hannah are taken to a nearby, very posh house, which is the military base.

They believe themselves to finally have some sort of safety. However, they are the only ones there besides the small group of soldiers. Soon enough, it turns out that the leader, Major West, has sent out the communication picked up by Frank and had promised his men women - and now there were two. After an alteration, when some of the soldiers are about to attack Selena and Hannah, the one soldier that rushes to help the women and Jim are taken into custody and brought to the nearby woods by two soldiers. There, they are about to be shot, but Jim gets away. He hides in the bushes, noticing an airplane overhead.

While the women are very much in distress, Jim sets off an alarms by the road block, Major West sets out to take care of business himself, with the help of just one soldier. His comrade gets killed by Jim, who also cuts the car's wire, stranding the Major, who has to make his way back now on foot. Jim returns to the house, where he first frees one infected former soldier, that has been kept on a chain in the yard. After the infected makes it into the house, the virus takes his usual, speedy course, getting to all the soldiers (including the returning Major West) while Selena, Hannah and Jim make their escape.

Another 28 days later, the trio is settled in a house in a mountainous area. They have been working on stitching together bed linens and - in the last scene - spell out the word 'HELLO' to get the attention of the planes, passing over in regular intervals.

8/10

Fido

In the otherwise wholesome world of 1940's one would not expect to see zombies doing menial tasks, like delivering the morning paper or cutting the grass.

The zombie apocalypse has been averted a few years previously in the "zombie wars". And now, thanks to a collar controlling the zombies' urge to eat people, the creatures can be be put to use. Everyone in little Timmy's street has a few household zombies, but his father is scared of them. Eventually, his mom will go over her husband's head to obtain household help.

Timmy befriends him (it?) and names his new buddy Fido. Then one night, when there is a temporary hick-up in the collar, Fido kills Mrs. Henderson, the elderly neighbor who promptly turns into a zombie herself and soon a number of un-collared zombies roam the small town. Once again, the outbreak gets under control and all appears to be well again.

Fido's collar, however, continues to malfunction occasionally and he takes care of two bullies torturing Timmy. It is at this point that Timmy realizes that Fido does not try to eat him even at the times the collar malfunctions. After a few more hick-ups along the way, Fido becomes an actual member of the family.

Awww!

7/10

World War Z

Let me sum this up:
(1) We do not know what happened.
(2) We do not know how it started.
(3) We do not know where it started.
(4) This is not over.

Gerry Lane, formerly of the UN, is called back to duty when a zombie outbreak overruns the earth. He is sent off to assist one young, bright doctor to learn more about the new threat where they first heard of it - in South Korea. Unfortunately, the young, bright doctor panics, trips, and shoots himself falling down before he even got off the plane. So Gerry gathers all information he can get and moves on to Israel, who finished its big wall surrounding Jerusalem a week before it all began.

Unfortunately, in Jerusalem the inhabitants and newly arrived refugees are so happy about having found safe haven that they celebrate by singing and changing into microphones. We know that zombies react to and run towards sounds. This jubilation now is so loud that the creatures outside the city walls find a way of getting inside. It looks pretty impressive, too.

So Gerry has to move on. He boards a plane from Belarus that was destined for Jerusalem, as well, but immediately takes off again when they realize what is going on outside. On the plane, hidden away in a closet is one single zombie (of course), but one zombie is all it takes to start and epidemic. Gerry causes the plane to crash before he and his new found friend, an Israeli female soldier, get infected.

Luckily, they crash within walking distance of where they wanted to go anyway - a WHO research facility in Cardiff. It is there that Gerry realizes (through flashbacks) that the zombies avoid terminally ill people like the pest (pardon the pun). To test the theory he injects himself with some deadly disease or other. It works. The word spreads. The day is saved.

Yes, it has plot holes and relies on coincidences more often than it should. But it is very entertaining and the zombies in close-up really look pretty awesome. And the sound they make individually is great - in a very creepy way.

The 3D was yet again totally unnecessary, though.

7/10

The Cabin in the Woods

I love horror films. I very much like Richard Jenkins. I adore Bradley Whitford. I like the idea of a company pulling the strings behind the scenes to release different nightmarish scenarios on a group of unsuspecting young people. I love the poster.

The problem? I don't like this film.

Despite all the above mentioned ingredients it doesn't quite come together for me. The actual cabin-in-the-woods part of it is all very bland and I never cared for any of the people there. Not a one. I didn't care whether they lived or died and nothing that befell them was particularly scary to me.

The background part (the part with Jenkins and Whitford) was more interesting. The out-of-placeness of it was different and it is in the company environment that the film actually showed some humor. The deaths of pretty much everyone involved there was harder to take than that of any of the pretty young people.

Oh Josh Lyman Hadley! At least you went with a cocky remark on your lips. Good for you! *wipes-away-tear*

The fun part? All monsters imaginable getting unleashed and going into mayhem mode. Blood and gore and a murderous unicorn. But then there was the stupid, unimaginative, uninteresting, useless ending/explanation. The fucking Ancient Ones'?

Seriously?

3/10

Pontypool

You may have noticed by now that I watch a lot of horror films. In recent years I came across quite a few interesting ones (as in: they do not follow the apparent standard formula many genre films do) and a lot of those are Canadian products.

Canada gave us some real gems in that regard. The Cube series, the Ginger Snaps series, The Brood, or the classic Black Christmas to name a few.

With Pontypool, we get a zombie flick in which you don't actually see much of the zombies. As an avid reader using my imaginagion to draw up pictures of people, places, scenes is not a new concept. In films, however, rarely anything is left to you. What a breath of fresh air to watch a film that does not present bite-sized pieces of familiar patterns.

Almost the entire film takes place inside a small town radio station, where talk show host Grant Mazzy and his crew of two get disturbing reports about mobs going rampant all over town. Throughout the whole film we, the viewers, know as much or little as the characters in the film. We learn what is happening outside from frantic phone calls.

Eventually, the zombies reach the station, as does one Dr. Mendez, who seams to have had an unknowing hand in starting the outbreak. Even the infection that produces the zombies is out of the horror movie norm. What we see of the outside crowd is mostly hands and, later, shapes through dirty, bloody glass. The epidemic does affect one of the women working for the radio station and we do get to see how the affected act. In full detail.

This film is very, very interesting.

8/10

Mørke Sjeler (Dark Souls)



When his daughter Johanna is attacked with a drill and turned into a zombie, Morten Ravn goes off on his own to find the culprit and bring him to justice. Given that the policeman leading the investigation of a number of similar attacks is a smug asshole (fear not, he will get what he deserves), he really has no choice.

The film borrows heavily from themes used in other films and TV shows. There is the black oil dripping onto faces (familiar to anyone who watched The X Files) and a woman crawling awkwardly (à la Ju-On) towards her victim. Not even the big bad oil company as the ultimate baddie is a new concept. People and companies threatening the environment have taken a lot of the fictional blame since western cinema lost its favorite scapegoat, the USSR, to brotherly capitalism.

The film is at its best when it doesn't take itself too seriously - like when men start going at each other with drills, or Mr. Ravn makes funny sounds and laughs hysterically over every bad guy biting the dust while hunting him.

Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between.

3/10

Blood Creek (aka Town Creek)

What did I just watch?

It starts off with a mysterious Nazi sent to the States to educate himself in the occult and through the help of one special stone achieve a more desireable state of being. All for the Führer, of course. And then it turns into a Zombie flick. Now, I am all for Nazi Zombies (Dead Snow FTW!), but this?

First, we get:

...for all of 10 (!) minutes. And then it turns into:

The fuck did you do to Michael Fassbender? He looks disgusting, he speaks in tongues, he sucks human blood and he tears the skin off his face frequently, which makes him slightly less despicable each time but doesn't get him back to looking pretty again by the end of the film - he gets poisoned, strangled with barbed wire, stabbed and burned.

And not once does he get naked.

3/10