★ 2 / 10
Not even diehard fans of the zombie genre
Gimly
Not even diehard fans of the zombie genre should put themselves through this swill. The problems are almost all because of the low budget (the rest of them are…
Not even diehard fans of the zombie genre should put themselves through this swill. The problems are almost all because of the low budget (the rest of them are because of how apallingly derivative it is) but they are too glaringly obvious to get past.
_Final rating:★ - Of no value. Avoid at all costs._
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★ 2 / 10
A boring mess which zombified me
existential-tom
As much fun as a zombie film set in Leicester sounds, if you're expecting a modern-day Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue from this low-budget indie film…
As much fun as a zombie film set in Leicester sounds, if you're expecting a modern-day Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue from this low-budget indie film, I'm afraid I've got some disappointing news for you. Yes, despite its amusingly tautological title Zombie Undead is an amateurish and punishingly dull addition to the world of morti viventi cinema.
The movie opens with a terrorist detonating a dirty bomb somewhere in Leicester city centre (which is presumably the cause of the zombie virus in this film), before cutting to our heroine, Sarah (Ruth King), and her badly wounded father being driven to a hospital on the outskirts of the city by Steve (Barry Thomas). Upon arrival it's clear that something is amiss as the hospital's patients exhibit all manner of exotic flesh-wounds and seem to be bringing up blood left, right and centre. When Sarah's father goes into cardiac arrest, she faints at the sight of a surgeon ramming a hypodermic syringe of adrenalin into his chest.
Once she awakes the hospital seems deathly quiet, and she wonders around for a while before being confronted by a long-haired zombie who overpowers her. Luckily for Sarah, a survivor named Jay (James Corden-lookalike Kris Tearse) appears from nowhere, machete in hand, and returns the shuffling cadaver to the land of the dead. From there, the two of them spend a very long time indeed wondering around the hospital looking for fellow survivors and occasionally bumping into the odd zombie or two. Eventually a party of survivors is assembled and the group attempts to battle its way past the hordes of walking corpses on their way out of the building.
There's little more to say about the film's plot, although there's an interminably boring segment tagged on at the end which sees Sarah fleeing the hospital and ending up on a farm owned by the world's chattiest farmer before the movie ends abruptly (and inexplicably) with footage of a group of soldiers being attacked by zombies.
Now, I know what you're thinking: it sounds good, doesn't it? Sounds like it'll be an utter trash-fest, reminiscent of Bruno Mattei's Zombie Creeping Flesh. Well it's not.
There's so little action in this film it makes Oasis of the Zombies seem positively fast-paced, and what little there is suffers from a case of the Andy Milligan 'swirl-camera' technique every time a special effect is deployed. The characters are boring, flat and underdeveloped and spend absolutely ages standing around in rooms or lifts exchanging dialogue like: "We've got to go, now! Do you understand?" "Yes, we need to move." "Let's go, we've got to keep moving" and so on, to the point of absurdity. Every dialogue scene is stretched out as long as it conceivably can be, presumably to pad the running time out to 80 minutes.
The film is shot on what looks like digital video, which isn't a bad thing necessarily, but the result looks so cheap and washed out that it doesn't even have the production values of a TV soap opera. And the direction? It's hideous. The first few minutes of the film play like a crummy music video, with frantic coked-up editing and eye-straining fades, wipes and dissolves (Homer Simpson's obsession with 'star wipe' leaps to mind), and as I've said above, any scene which requires anything other than a static shot of the characters is clumsily handled and fumbled through, presumably to disguise the lack of SFX available to the makers. And the acting, while not terrible, is very am-dram. A great many scenes reminded me of theatre workshops I did in GCSE drama lessons.
In fact the whole thing plays very much like a student film, which is perhaps what it began life as (one of its principal shooting locations is De Montford University in Leicester). Sadly what we have here is a pretty crummy film wrapped up in tantalising advertising and boasting a juicy title, much like The Astro Zombies from decades ago. There's nothing to recommend this film, really. It's not funny, not even unintentionally so; it boasts so little gore it's a wonder the thing received an 18 certificate; its plot is threadbare and padded out to the extreme and, ultimately, you'll be pining for your DVDs of classic Italian zombie gut-munchers before even half the running time has elapsed. Though, that said, the disc makes a great coaster
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5%
AUDIENCE
· 50 ratings
2.4/10
514
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So if they are zombies that are undead, does that mean that they are regular people shambling about....