Tag Archives: review

Overlord (2018)

Overlord 2018Frankly, I’m not 100% sure the 2018 D-Day film Overlord is a zombie film.  But, given all that encompasses how-zombies-come-to-be in films these days, I’m not 100% sure it isn’t.  So I’m reviewing Overlord just to make sure it’s covered.

The basic premise of Overlord is that on the eve of D-Day, as some of the pre-invasion sabotage work that was planned and performed, a paratrooper squad is sent to destroy a German radio tower located in an old church. Their plane is shot down and crashes, and a contingency of the remaining squad continues forward with the mission.  As they head toward the village where the church is located they run into Chloe — a young French woman who is a badass.  As the few paratroopers work their way into the church, they find that it’s not just a Nazi radio location but that they’ve been conducting extensive experiments in the basement.

Backpacking through Europe

I’ll stop here to avoid any spoilers — but in truth you really can’t state any spoilers about this film BECAUSE WE’VE ALL SEEN THIS BEFORE.

A badass with a flamethrower that is!

The film stars a bunch of people whom we’ve never really seen.  They do a fine job at acting and it’s nice to see unfamiliar faces — otherwise this would have starred Ray StevensonJohn Turturro, and/or Tom Sizemore.  In addition, it has directors and writers and people we don’t know … but the one familiar name is J.J. Abrams.  I draw attention to this because I’m surprised his name is at all attached to this!

This film is familiar and predictable.  Apparently it had a budget of $38 million … off hand … I don’t know why.  I think they were going for a 1960s-1970s film noir thing — and they nailed it without all the dead-space that Quentin Tarantino fluffs his films with — and I think they were going for a B-movie feel, and it works in that way.  But $38 MILLION?!?  And here I thought governments were wa$teful!!! Seriously, this film ought to have been made for half with about $20 million going to creating jobs.  And yet, it made $41.9 million at the box office … which $4M is a lot of money … but for films with this sort of budget, my understanding is that profiting so little makes it a financial flop.

Castle Wolfenstein
Remember this?

Frankly — speaking of Ray Stevenson — although it takes place in modern-day, I think Outpost (2008) was a better film.  I could see Overlord as a  back-story film, and it sure as hell would be better than Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013), which WAS the disaster of a backstory to the 2008 film.  I could see Overlord as a different project in-line with the initial Outpost project … kind of like a back-backstory.  That for me is the only real saving grace for this film!  In the end, it looks like a rip-off mishmash of Outpost and Castle Wolfenstein without paying for the rights to either.

And that’s not even going into the gross historic WWII inaccuracies built into this film — most of which was to make the PC-crowd not loose their self-righteous factless minds.  On the whole, I give this film a Yellow Puss rating.

Good News – There’s no way to make an Overlord 2
… hopefully.

I will add — there are cool special effects shots at the beginning of this film when planes are flying into France and at the end when its star, Jovan Adepo as Boyce, does a one-shot running out of the laboratory/church.

One Shot
When you see this, count your blessings, the film over!

Links

The Dead (2010)

For starters, I have to say that I’m surprised that this tile wasn’t already used by some previous zombie film. Maybe it was and I’m just not aware of it, but let’s get into it, shall we?

RATING – Yellow Puss, nearly Green Ooze – The Dead is an interesting film among Z-films.

Somewhere off the coast of war-torn West Africa a plane-load of American soldiers are evacuating.  The plane crashes in an area where the night before a horde of zombies attacked villages through the area — and US military engineer, Lieutenant Brian Murphy, is the only survivor.

With no other options and limited resources,  Lieutenant Murphy starts to walk his way out of the country. Yeah, it’s The Journey, but for this film it works rather well. Amid a country of zombies there are very few humans — often called ‘survivors‘ — and our engineer finds and teams up with a regional soldier, Daniel, who is gone AWOL and looking for his son.  In time, Daniel asks Brian to locate his son.  And that’s all I’ll tell you about this as to not give any spoilers….

If National Geographic made a zombie film, it would look like this…

Here’s the thing about this film and my review — call it a confession if you will — I did not get to write my review after watching it, and I had a lot of good things to say during the viewing. Once I got around to writing I got very busy with Xmas holiday stuff and touring the state of Washington as a guest player with a Celtic-rock band — I did not have time to re-watch and better-write my review, but I will tell you this …

Remember kids, always brush your teeth.

This film has an unexpected element and rather different charactre among Z-films. It wasn’t a great film but it was a good film, and frankly it was hard not to give it a Green Ooze rating. It also gives some beautiful views of parts of Burkina Faso and Ghana. If you are a zombie film fan, The Dead is a must-watch.

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Addendum

Yes — an ADDENDUM!  Why?  Because I wrote and published this before, and somehow it survived a hard drive crash I had, but it didn’t originally get posted when I moved my website.  ANYWAY… Take a look at the Wikipedia page for this film regarding the production — it’s nearly amazing the film even got made…

The cast and crew encountered many problems.  Shooting was planned for 6 weeks — it took 12!  First there was a delay in shipping the equipment to Africa which added 3 weeks.  The lead actor, Rob Freeman, contracted malaria and almost died in the middle of filming.  Additional delays were caused by major damage to camera equipment.  Howard J. Ford — one of the directors — later published a book, titled Surviving the Dead (2012), that detailed the troubled production.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

It seems that this is a review I lost with my hard drive crash nearly 2 years ago.  Here’s news — you’re not missing anything — nothing in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and nothing with my review.  If a film doesn’t register with you, it’s hard to review it — so what would you read from that?  ANSWER – me, annoyed.

Anyway, I’m working from memory here, so let’s get started…

Colour Rating — Yellow Puss or Red Blood … whatever …

I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, I have had no plans to, and after this film I am further not interested.  It’s amusing that Seth Grahame-Smith could write a quirky parody mashup (published 2009) combining the 1813 Jane Austen‘s classic novel with elements of modern zombie fiction, but mostly I just found it snooty and boring — I couldn’t get in to it.  When they showed the action stuff, it worked for me, but all otherwise it was the whos-in-love-with-whom Jane-Austen-junk my mother warned me about.

Not a gore-fest, this Z-film was a SNORE-fest!

There was clearly a lot of money behind this film, and one good thing I can say about it is that I’m sure it will perturb the Jane Austen purists.  Hopefully, it will be at least a little fun that it was re-envisioned.  For me though, coming from the zombie-film fan perspective . . . something was lost with this to capture the the zombie-fan demographic.

Conclusion…

If you’re a Pride-Prejudice/Austen fan and you’re open-minded — go for it.  If you’re a zombie-fan and you want to make sure you’ve watched EVERY zombie related film, well … good luck.  If you’re a die-hard zombie-film fan …. don’t bother.

LINKS to help you sleep

Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)

It should be no surprise that that Day of the Dead 2: Contagium  rings in as another Yellow Puss.  Probably it should be Red Blood.  I’ll tell you what I have to say about this film, but first please read these which I found under “Reception” on Wikipedia….

Peter Dendle called DOTD2 Contagium a “boring, transparent feature” that was “forgotten almost as soon as it was released”.

Steve Barton of Dread Central rated it 0/5 stars and wrote, “This is a sequel in name only, created solely to generate revenue from ill informed fans.” Contagium

Joseph Savitski of Beyond Hollywood wrote that the film “is not only an exercise in incompetence, but also a blatant attempt at false advertising.”

Dennis Prince of DVD Verdict wrote, “There is no warning too strong that would urge you to avoid this DVD at all costs.”

So what does BagpiperDon think of Contagium?

Bearing in mind that this film hand a whole whopping $1M budget in 2005 — that should already tell you that this is a nothing film.  It was confusing as to the significance in light of the 1985 “Day of the Dead” not to mention the “Day of the Dead” from 2008.  It seems like a film that wants to have a few good new ideas to the genre.  Also, it had the fun of being a simple, low-budget Z-film ….. but in the end… it’s a waste of time.

Links

Juan of the Dead (2011)

Juan of the Dead, Juan de los MuertosJuan Of The Dead (AKA Juan de los Muertos) is fun Spanish-Cuban zombie comedy.  If you’re like me, you just gotta appreciate a Z-film that shows its first zombie kill in under three minutes into the story. Oh yeah, it may be a new record!

Without any explanation zombies appear in Cuba and start eating people.  Middle-aged slacker Jaun, along with his fellow small-time crooks and deadbeats, take to the streets of Havana to face an army of the undead.  Emergency news reports are broadcast amid the chaos…  The surge of living-dead have been identified as ‘dissidents’ revolting against the Cuban government.  The regime accuses the USA for the attack.  Everything is under control even when nothing is being done.  Seeing opportunity, Jaun gathers and trains his friends to be zombie killers and starts a business called “Juan Of The Dead — We’ll kill your loved ones”.

For those familiar with the Cuban regime and its people, the movie is a hard critic to both — which is why it was never released in Cuba and apparently was only shown on-screen at film festivals.  Juan Of The Dead attempts to mock every cinematic clichés (daughter hating father, friend about to die, farewell , even Matrix-style fights).  The nuances of Cuban humor can get lost-in-translation to non-Spanish speakers — for example — in one of the most celebrated jokes, Juan is asked to kill a cow but he refuses because it is too dangerous; In Cuba killing a cow is worse crime than killing people.

Zombie film fans will will be pleasantly surprised with this film especially with seeing fun nods to Shaun Of The Dead.  There was one thing I saw in particular that I have seen in another zombie film*.  The film is in Spanish and subtitled — sorry, no over-dubs.  This film is Not Rated, and aside from the zombie gore and violence there is some nudity (including z-film boobs) and adult humor/topics.  Oh — and how do I rate Juan Of The Dead ? … Light Green to full Green.
(*Select this line to read the spoiler –> Underwater zombies walking on the ocean floor that seem to be able to swim up if it means getting a bite … though that bite could come from a shark!  Oh yeah, this was also done in Pirates Of The Caribbean<– all the way to here)

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World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries (2011)

World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
Remember how the cover for the first film has NOTHING to do with the film? Well, consistency is supposed to be good…

Have you ever had the experience where someone you know excitedly says “Hey, ya gotta see this film!“?  Then once you watch it you’re left thinking “What the heck was that about?”, or worse “There is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with my friend!”  Welcome to to World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries 2.

Immediately you can tell that this project has a higher budget and is visually more satisfying than the 2006 predecessor.  Then you get into the story and you start to see the problems…

The first thing you notice — as with the original film — is that the DVD cover is once again horribly misleading.  The cover art looks better than the film, and it represents something other than the content of the film.

Field full of zombies
I’m warning you — act like threatening zombies or we’ll shoot you!!!

The zombies feel very non-threatening — even less than in the original film.  The make-up is insufficient, the scares nearly non-existent, and the zombies are often so stiff they would be played better by untrained department store mannequins.  Add to that, when it comes to shooting the zombies I get the impression that the British film makers don’t have a clue as to what firearms sound like anymore (especially in the scene pictured).  The firearm sound effects left me non-pulsed — perhaps they were just the on-location recording of the blanks the actors were firing.

The biggest downfall of the movie…

World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
Yep, they should have stuck with this poster as the DVD cover

… aside from the emaciated plot and the you-are-there hand-held cinematography — are some of the specific content choices that film makers Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates included.  Various gangs of survivors prove to be even more vile than the zombies.  This is well summed up in a review by FlickeringMyth.com when they wrote…

“There are a couple of, frankly, unneeded rape scenes (one on a female zombie) that just felt like Bartlett and Gates wanted to do some kind of rape revenge film, but gave up and worked zombies into it”.

Frankly it left this bagpiper & humble amateur zombie-film reviewer astounded.  I cannot recall feeling this disturbed by any zombie film I have previously seen.  This content included a challenged young man bullied into delivering a beating upon one of the primary male characters, and then pushed into committing a graphic rape/murder on one of the female primaries.  I have to wonder where the writer and his co-director think that this was appropriate, or fit within the film!  I also have to wonder about the actors (or even the crew) assuming they saw the script before they agreed to do the film — why would they participate in bringing this film to fruition?

Is there any redemption for this film?

World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011, gas mask
Me around people who smoke

There are elements to this film that really work — the albeit over-used zombie-trope military element, the military and civilian survivors trying to escape from England, and the guys who ambiguously appear wearing protective suits and gas masks.  However it seems as though Bartlett and Gates thought that their ideas were so great — so sound — that they didn’t think to check their script or finished film with a third party.  And if they did, they didn’t listen to them say “There’s some good stuff here, but over all THIS IS A BAD IDEA.”  Or maybe they just half-assed it and figured this would fill a feature.  In the end, it is as The Daily Mail described the film, it’s an “88 minute waste of electricity”, and I rate it Red Blood.

Seriously, I’m starting to think I ought to make a list titled “Zombie Films To Avoid Watching“.  Do you think I would have this one on it?  YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT!

A List Of Words Irrelevant To This Zombie Film
World of the Dead, The Zombie Diaries 2, 2011
At least you see one of these folks in the film — but destroyed city, a massive horde of zombies? Nope nope-nope!
  • Smash hit
  • Phenomenon

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pew pew pew
pew pew pew!

The Zombie Diaries (2006)

You NEVER see this guy in the film, which is too bad because the cover looks like it should actually be a pretty cool film.

WOW, where to start?  How about my rating for the 2006 film “Zombie Diaries” … Frankly, I’ve flip-flopped.  Originally I gave it a yellow puss — very pale yellow puss.  When I started watching the 2011 sequel I dropped it to a red blood.  And then I saw more of the sequel and boosted the original flick back to yellow.  Yep, that’s right, the first film is better than the second in this humble bagpiper’s opinion!

The back of the DVD case cites The Dark Side (whatever that is) as having said that this is “The best zombie film ever.”*  If that’s the case, I’m giving up on zombie films.  Fortunately, the are patently wrong in this regard.
(*I tried to find the specific article on their site without luck… did they change their mind, delete their review, and disassociate themselves with this film entirely?)

THE GOOD NEWS

This film could serve as insights to people’s different experiences before Jim wakes up in 28 Days Later — although this isn’t possible according to Wikipedia since “The second chapter, “The Scavengers”, takes place one month later.“, and the third chapter presumably takes place later still.

THE BAD NEWS
The truth is in a real zombie situation, you and your friends are going to only be as awesome as these folks …

Imagine if you will Blair Witch Project (otherwise known as the worst bad film ever) but with the actual presence of a horror threat — in this case smatterings of amateur-actor zombies.  Instead of a couple of Blair Witch guys screaming at nothing and pissing themselves like millennials, you get the audiobook version of World War Z giving insights to various people and their experiences as things fell apart due to the outbreak or mass presence of zombies.  All of this is done in a you-are-there found-footage hand-held-documentary filming format … which I often find annoying because the filming is overly jerky and the audio is incredibly noisy with hyper yelling. In this case this looks like a an amateur film with decent execution

HEY YOU GGUUUUYYYYYYYSSSSS!!!

The film doesn’t begin to get interesting until 14 minutes in.  It possibly starts to interconnect around 37 minutes.  Perhaps one of the best things about it is that it gets an interesting look around 39 minutes when the visual switches to night vision.

Otherwise, what do you have in this film?  Bickering Brits, who, if not for zombies taking over the world, would be complaining about Americans and claiming that they’re SO much better and nothing like us …. except for the bickering, complaining, and conceitedness, all-in-all failing to acknowledge that everywhere you go people are just people.  Yep, everyone sucks just as much as everyone else everywhere else, including English people and even Canadians …  but especially people in France.  In truth, between the rigors of long term survival along with death and fighting off zombies, the stress level in such a situation would be pretty high so bickering seems realistic.  The other thing that’s bogus — and common in movies — is that the characters are complaining about not having enough guns in a country where guns are highly restricted, and yet they’re instantly pretty damn good shots for people who are unaccustomed to firearms.

THE YOU-ARE-THERE PROBLEM
When you see zombies this badass, you’re dealing with a home-spun Z-film production

One of the things I keep thinking over and over which applies to this film and any you-are-there hand-held film — and I’m sure I’m not the first to ask this — why would anyone film all of this stuff?!? Everyone one of these types of films need to justify this, few if any of them do. Similarly, particularly a story that takes place a number of months, a year, more than one year, whatever — why are these folks bothering to still record, especially when they must be running out of film or disc storage space, how are they continuing to power their devices, eventually why would they bother? While the hand-held you-are-there style film making has a certain feel and effect, to a degree it is also cheaper to make, which may also be a motivator behind writing/creating a story in this fashion. Mostly, I just don’t think it works all that well or at least to say as often as these films come out.

Hopefully the 2011 sequel — World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries — is better.  But then you got to wonder about a crummy film that gets the juice behind it to make a sequel … Did other audience members think it was good enough to support a second film?  Are the film makers deluded or trying to fix their errors from the first film?  Did I leave the stove on?  Is the redhead at work flirting with me or does she flirt with everyone?  Instead of using gel I wonder if I could use wood glue in my hair and then only have to style it once a week?

Links

A List Of Words Not To Believe Relative To This Film
  • Best
  • Powerhouse

The Devil Wears Prada – Zombie (EP)

Well, I listened to some metal today — Zombie (EP), the 2010 release by The Devil Wears Prada.  Frankly … not my thing. I’m cool with metal but I think Sesame Street is a much better gig for Cookie Monster.  Something a guitarist pointed out to me years ago – he said “I love distortion, but it also hides the poor playing of a lot of musicians.”

This album did feature a few things that I enjoyed – things that switched it up and gave it any redeeming depth and texture …

  • Escape – Thunder at the beginning of track one … some speaking mid-track of a guy on communicating what he’s seeing over a walkie-talkie or a phone … a car (or some such) alarm being used musically … groaning zombies.
  • Anatomy – Starts out with the sound of a nearby chainsaw.  It’s also really sweet when they kick into sound like they’re backed by a late-80s/early-90s boy band.  Way to bring it back guys, right on!
  • Outnumbered – Starts with a report warning of danger (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, news agency, etc).  Yeah, that’s about the only good thing I have to say about this track.
  • Revive – There was a little bit of music and singing in here that wasn’t speed guitars and Cookie Monster.  I’m good with metal speed guitars, drums, etc …. but the Cookie Monster thing …. bleh!  Really there is very little good I can say about this track.  Suffice to say, not everything is for everyone.
  • Survivor – I listened to this track three times before typing here.  I can’t tell anything special about this track.  It’s all the noise of the first four tracks and nothing terribly interesting.

In Conclusion… I may listen to this album again for a few of the ‘texture’ ideas, but I don’t see myself listening to it out of interest, inspiration, or especially to feel anything other than frazzled out of my mind.  To each their own, not my thing.

Cookie Monster at Wikipedia and his character profile at IMDB

Cookie Monster Metal at Wikipedia

The Devil Wears Prada and their 23Aug2010 album Zombie (EP) at Wikipedia

Lyrics to Zombie (EP) because I can’t tell what the heck they’re singing … maybe I’m showing my age.

Cemetery Man (1994)

This is perhaps one of the worst reviews I could give.  I put this DVD in my player, watched the trailer, and popped the disc back out.  The preview looked so-so, but being a zombie film my think is to watch it still — because if I only watched the well-made Z-films then I’d only have about a dozen reviews and all of them would be on my Favourites List.  The issue that I had with Cemetery Man was that it was subtitled and did not have a language over-dub option, and at the time I didn’t have time to watch a film that required me to read (I usually work on something while I watch a film at home, usually my laptop).  I’ve been told that an over-dub version followed the 1994 release a few years later — so I may try to get my hands on that and give this film another go.  Still, IMDB indicates that this film had a $4-million budget (which is not just low but it is LOW) and grossed $253,969 at the US box-office ….. so how much of a film am I missing here really?!?

Links

Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013)

Right up front, I want to be abundantly clear about Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz, I rate this film Red Blood.

As far as I’m concerned Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz does not deserve the honor of a review or a comment on my webpage.  HOWEVER, I bought a copy, I’ve seen it, and I’m fairly thorough …. and I’ll share my opinion for other film fans of a genre so they know to avoid this terrible addition to an otherwise great series.

Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz = AVOID

So there are a few things that happen in HolloWood that really stink up art, films, creative ideas …. and I mean stink up like the scrapings from the dog park at the end of a July weekend.  One of them is excessive creative liberties …. “I paid for the license on this story, and now regardless of whatever that story is I can do what I want — and I do!”  Another one is the thought that world federation wrestlers, extreme fighters, or ultimate weight lifters can act …. instead of putting them out to pasture once they’ve body-slammed their brains out or whatever, someone tries putting them into film.  Sometimes that works — a great example would be Dwayne Johnson — not only did we get lucky there, we got a real gift.  Usually what’s done is they put them in high-action/low-story roles, and because there’s a bunch of action it must be a good film.  WRONG!

Sneaky!

This film takes the setting of Outpost and tries to give the back-story — the origins of the machine and the experiments — and strings along a battle-royal with some Russian Special Forces soldiers who come off more as resistance fighters and ultimately does nothing to establish the subtitle of the ‘Rise of the Spetsnaz‘.

Please, lob a grenade at this turd.

The opportunity for a quality, meaningful, story-establishing prequel to Outpost (2008) was entirely missed with Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz.  As my understanding goes, there was more money wasted on Rise of the Spetsnaz than there was spent on making Outpost: Black Sun (2012)Black Sun is in my mind a superior film to Rise of the SpetsnazBlack Sun derivatives from the character of the original 2008 film but stays enough within the universe.  Rise of the Spetnaz just took the setting and did whatever it wanted for the sake of making some meatheads an acting career.  In Black Sun the world is being threatened by the machine and the un-dead phase-shifting Nazi super soldiers, and had the money that was thrown away in making Rise of the Spetsnazbeen put to Black Sun it could have delivered this world-threat development better.

FULL … METAL … JACKET — oh, whoops, wrong film!

I now own the 2008, 2012, and 2013 Outpost films.  I’m glad to have seen all three to know all the ground covered with the original idea, but had I known what was done with Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz I wouldn’t have paid ten cents for a copy.

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