State of Emergency

Another reviewer wrote "don't expect a zombie movie". I think that is a thing of perception. What is a zombie movie to you? What do you combine with it and what expectations do you have when you watch one where zombies are involved? Because yes this is not that action orientated and yes it is laying a lot of weight and attention on the living rather than the (un)dead.

That doesn't mean they are not a big part of the movie and the issues of the characterts involved here. You get cliches and running zombies here - so bear with those if you can. This is low budget but still quite nicely done overall. There are worse outputs out there and this is really slow burning too ...

In Montgomery County, the couple Jim (Jay Hayden) and his fiancée Emilie (McKenna Jones) is ready to go to work when there is an explosion of a chemical plant in the outskirts of the town. Soon Montgomery County is in quarantine and under siege by the army and people turn into zombies.

Jim and Emilie escape from the town, but they have a car accident and Emilie is deadly wounded. They arrive in a farmhouse, but Emilie dies. Jim receives a phone call and a man named Scott (Scott Lilly) invites him to move to the tobacco warehouse close to the house where he is. Jim meets Scott and he introduces his wife Julie (Kathryn Todd Norman) and the unfriendly and weird Alex "Ix" (Tori White). Along the days, they become friends while they wait to be rescued by the marines. Will they survive?

"State of Emergency" is a surprisingly good and dramatic low-budget horror movie. The plot has great character development, good story of sympathy and friendship, but very few zombies; therefore fans of zombies will certainly be disappointed. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Código Vermelho" ("Red Code")

This trash heap of the VERY tired 'zombie' bs was made on a budget, starring NON-professionals, and (s someone who works in the REAL version of this 'let's make a film' business); I'm tired of all these NON-SAG/AFTRA people in front of the camera, asked NON-IATSE behind (what that means is NO ONE involved in this pile of dung has ANY connection with the film business).

The problem stems from the idiotic idea that the 'more (product...i.e., 'films'), the 'better'.

I'm not the only one who grew up (at the birth of cable) with limited channels, but I was thrilled to find an old classic film to watch.

Now, with streaming services up the wazzoo, they act like they need to fill a gazillion free channels, and the only way to do that - on the cheap - is to throw garbage like this in the air.

This dung pile has those typically nauseating opening credits (the king's one sees moorings on YouTube, who doesn't own it and has no legal right to put something on their channel). Yet, they make this big, pathetic opening logo, like your sweet in a genuine film.

So you see some amateur graphics; 'ACME Pictures presents nobody in a film worn by John Doe, produced by John Doe, directed by John Doe...and on, and on...

I only put it on because I was bored for a few minutes and wanted to chuckle.

Just as I thought, this is EXACTLY what I just said; it's some 'film' written by (their last name's) Clay brothers, produced by these identical Clay brothers, and directed by-guess-yes, one of the Clay brothers.

There's NO ONE you've EVER heard of in things like this. It's amateurs from hell. Even worse, EVERY modern American cliché (if you wonder where these 'conspiracies' come from, look no further).

This one goes something like this: an explosion at a(American) military base causes a chemical release of bio-weapons, and these 'bio-weapons' cause the people (always in some Southern state - yuck).

As someone with a brain who's neither stupid nor a citizen of the States, it's VERY sad how far the country's fallen (primarily because of these Southern yahoos) in the past 15-20 years.

So that you know, bioweapons are ILLEGAL (of course, the paranoid idiots who live in the States believe otherwise. I wish post-birth abortions were allowed).

The ONLY countries creating them are the same dangerous group we all know: N Korea, Russia, (formerly) Iraq, etc. Even better, places like Iraq build them illegally and use them as their citizens! Brilliant.

Not.

So, back to the dung; the first twenty minutes of this have virtually no dialogue. The viewer watches some guy with a woman (I'm guessing his girlfriend, etc) 'escaping' from this quarantined area. In our first scene with the hair couple, she promptly dies (bullet wound. He next saw her dragging her body to a horse barn (not begging from knowing about, not caring about the American South, it looks like A VERY well-off privately owned 'horsey hotel'. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it's owned by the Clay brothers, mommy and daddy, and they're just two spoilt Southerners who are starving for attention and think they're film auteurs - they're not, but are too stupid to get two jobs, stop their folks foolishly spoil them-so touching.

Listen, there are many BETTER things one can do than watch stuff like this: paint a wall, read a book, go to the supermarket.

Anything but watching garbage like this.

Before I go, I just wanted to say how amusing it is (and I'm being VERY sarcastic) that this 'non-picture' has NOT one, but three entries into the 'plot' box in IMdB (I put a plot in parentheses because the dolts who write the things in those boxes DON'T know that a plot is NOT what it means when it CLEARLY says 'synopsis' on that box (a synopsis is JUST one, or, at most, two sentences which give A VERY brief overview of the film's main plotline. So instead of simply writing something like 'an explosion at a military base causes townsfolk nearby to turn into zombies', they think the longer, the better (BTW; whenever you see ANYTHING on ANY TV, the little box which tells you about what it is your watching - THAT'S the 'synopsis' box, and the reason SO MANY of these boxes are so filled they end with '...' - which must proper can't click on (their TV), is because of this very reason. One of THE WORST examples is some egotist who calls itself h-gg- I will not give it any more credit. Its main goal is to write novel-length things for EVERYthing.

If you come into this expecting something like the Walking Dead, or any of the other hundreds of Zombie movies out there, you will be disappointed. This movie is actually more about the characters and the personalities and what they are experiencing and going through emotionally, than it is about Zombies.

Taking it for what it is, this movie is okay. It's not fantastic, but it is okay. If anything, the Zombies almost get in the way of the actual story itself, at least what little of them there are.

The movie is a wee bit confused in that it is trying to cater to multiple audiences by being a dramatic tale with some conservatively added violence, guns and gore. Doesn't quite work, but I don't think it completely fails either.

Although low-budget zombie movies are ten a penny these days and, it's fair to say, the majority of them are absolute rubbish, STATE OF EMERGENCY offers something a little different. For a start, it looks like a professional, well-made movie despite the low budget; it has great production values and it avoids being cheesy for the most part.

Of course, there's a flip side to this coin, and the main detraction with the film is that it's incredibly slow. There are lots and lots of long, drawn-out sequences where the protagonist just barricades himself inside a building and waits...and waits...and waits. Some viewers might find this off-putting, although I found that the tension levels were high, which kept me watching.

The acting isn't bad, and pretty good for a B-movie, and as mentioned the technical values are decent. The zombies themselves are fast-moving and ultra-aggressive, much like the ones in 28 DAYS LATER, and the scare sequences are well handled. STATE OF EMERGENCY is far from perfect, and one of the disappointments is that the ending just fizzles out instead of bangs, but in a sea of trash watching it is a nice surprise.