Plaga Zombie - The Beginning

The Argentinian horror film "Plaga Zombie" entertainingly combines the alien invasion plot with a zombie epidemic plot: in this case, dastardly extraterrestrials infect select people with a virus, and then just wait for them to mutate and attack other humans. A trio gets together to tackle the problem: "doctor" Bill Johnson (Pablo Pares), mathematician Max Giggs (Hernan Saez), and wrestler John West (Berta Muniz).

With Saez and Pares also co-directing (and the three stars writing the screenplay), "Plaga Zombie" was filmed on a true micro-budget. (Apparently, the equivalent of less than $120.) And yet, it benefits from so much gonzo, glorious, go-for-broke Do It Yourself enthusiasm that it's impossible to resist. The bargain-basement gore is hilariously, wonderfully over the top. After a while, Saez, Pares, and Muniz just drop any pretense of telling a story to just concentrate on cartoonish, macabre mayhem. The second half is particularly amusing, with characters ending up with almost as many lives as nine cats.

The actors are good fun to watch, especially the upbeat, engaging Muniz as the brawny hero who declares that his feet & hands are his best weapons. The scores of extras playing zombies are very energetic, and this little film does have a pretty good pace, dropping us into the story proper with little preamble, and the running time is a brief and agreeable 69 minutes.

For those who don't shut this off once the end credits start rolling, there is a quick coda that is worth waiting for.

Seven out of 10.

Plaga Zombie is an extremely low budget splatstick flick clearly inspired by the early movies of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, with lots of inventive camera-work and an abundance of cheap and cheerful gore effects. Sadly, the weak plot, poor performances, pitiful humour and some of the crappiest looking zombies imaginable (I've seen better face painting at a school fete) prevent this one from from coming anywhere near to matching the brilliance of The Evil Dead and Bad Taste.

The film opens with evil aliens abducting a young man and infecting him with a zombie virus before returning him to Earth. As the plague spreads, wrestler John West (Berta Muñiz), medical student Bill Johnson (Pablo Parés) and mathematician Max Giggs (Hernán Sáez) are forced to take up arms against the living dead.

Considering the almost non-existent budget of approximately $120, I guess that all involved should be commended for actually delivering anything remotely resembling a coherent film, but the fact remains that, despite some bold direction and a few creative effects, the overall movie simply isn't that great. The 2001 sequel, Plaga zombie: Zona mutante would take the same splatstick approach, but would show improvements in most departments, making it a far more enjoyable watch.

I love zombie films, but am reminded far too often of how easy it is for people with no money and even less original ideas to churn out really bad ones. I was recently a one-day background zombie extra in a local low-budget zombie short film where my friend was helping with makeup, but I'm not expecting miracles when I see the final product. Here I will give you a review that isn't influenced by the reviewer being from the same country or even town as the filmmakers. It feels like some of the positive feedback seen on IMDb might be from people who know the filmmakers.

Wow. This is truly of the 'shot-on-video no-budget backyard zombie genre' (plus aliens). This feels like a home movie shot with friends who can't act and that's pretty much what it is. It's still better than "Dead Life", but then again what isn't? It wants to be something like Peter Jackson's "Braindead" (aka Dead Alive) with its gross out fluids and even a lawnmower joke, but the difference is that Peter Jackson had a well-made film with: a funny script, some evidence of a minor budget, people who could act, a crew who had an idea of how to make a film and something resembling a coherent narrative and story that kept your interest. This really has none of those ingredients. The guys behind Plaga Zombie may be fans of Jackson, Rodriguez and Raimi (three cultishly popular directors who've made horror films on small budgets), but in this film they didn't really exhibit a fraction of the talent or ingenuity of those directors. Their sequel was much better and hopefully in time they will improve and provide us fans with something worth watching more than once. I know this was made with no budget, but a good script doesn't take money, just creativity and an ability to write dialogue. This film is lacking a good script. Go watch Rodriguez's short film "Bedhead" to see what can be done with very little resources and a bit of ingenuity.

I tried watching Plaga Zombie once before and gave up halfway through and put my DVD back on the shelf with my other zombie movies. Months later I finally gave the sequel a chance and found it had some merits and decided to try watching this first film again to see where it started. Immature humor can be done well by filmmakers who can write a script well and get the right cast and crew behind them. The excessive amount of childish humor here might seem like really clever stuff if you're in the 7th grade and haven't bothered to discover better low budget films yet, otherwise you'll probably be disappointed. Plaga Zombie only looks a little better than those cheesy home movie short films M. Night Shyamalan made as a kid and sometimes puts on his dvds to show his humble origins.

STORY: Dr. Bill is a med school dropout; I suspect this is not because of the accident they mention, but because of his complete ineptitude to diagnose a patient. His roommate wakes up with his back covered in what appears to be a whole case of used bubblegum affixed to his back (remember never to fall asleep chewing gum!). Bill's buddy, an out of work wrestler, runs into the room asking him to help his former manager. It appears both have the same set of symptoms, which our genius would be doctor surmises is some disease that infects the body and then the mind. Brilliant work, doc! They eventually realize aliens have infected their friends and neighbors and there is some sort of zombie epidemic which they must try to survive.

DE-ANIMATION METHODS: Dr. Bill concocts an acid solution to be administered via syringe to the infected to kill the 'host organism' thereby producing a large volume of foam and fluids from the body of the zombie. Cue cheesy gross out effects.

MAKE-UP EFFECTS: various colors of face paint, some latex and lots of colorful fluids and what looks like cornflake/oatmeal and food coloring type effects. Ultra low-budget.

The story, what little there was of it, couldn't keep my attention. I can't really recommend you spend 68 minutes of your life watching this unless you want to learn from its mistakes for your own backyard movie. Go straight to sequel, do not pass go and do not spend any $$$ (luckily there's a US DVD that included this film as an extra to the sequel, because this isn't worth spending your money on). Better yet, go watch "Braindead" (aka Dead Alive).

My prediction is that it won't take long for 'Plaga Zombie' to become a cult movie. A wrestler, a Star Trek fan and a Medicine student fighting against a group of angry zombies, I guess that's something you don't see every day.

And, of course, lots of blood!

Low budget zombie films are very hit and miss; with the vast majority of being the latter. They don't require much thought to put together, can often be made with a very limited budget and are (presumably) very fun to film; and this means that there are a lot of very amateur examples; and after having seen a bunch of these amateur examples, its done a lot to put me off the genre. When I heard that this film was made in Argentina for a few hundred dollars, I really did fear the worst. But actually, to my greatest surprise, this is actually a very good attempt at the genre! The main influence was obviously Peter Jackson's Braindead, and indeed there are a few nods to it; although the story is just your average zombie stuff and the film clearly takes influence from across the genre. We focus on a house where a few friends, including a doctor, a mathematician and a wrestler, have to band together in order to survive when a strange disease starts turning their other friends into the living dead.

It's obvious that the filmmakers valued their special effects very highly, and indeed the second half of the film is basically just an excuse to show plenty of splatter. The effects themselves are not particularly convincing; but they are very impressive considering what the filmmakers had to work with. There are plenty of them too and the blood flows freely and often, which is nice. The first half of the movie is slightly more character and story based and the build up is actually quite good as the characters are established. It has to be said that the film goes downhill once we get towards the ending because then it's basically just a Braindead-style bloodbath. The film takes a humorous approach to the zombies, which was previously seen in films like Video Dead and (again) Braindead and to be honest I find that a bit of a turn off; but with a film with such a low budget as this, you can't really blame them for adding comedic elements. The ending is fairly decent and while this is not exactly classic horror; it's decent for an hour's entertainment and should appeal to zombie fans.