World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen

The Plot. Yet another found footage movie this time about lost WW2 soldiers who turn out to be zombies.

Oh boy.

Everything about it stinks. Even the fake camera glitches. It sucks.

77 minutes long and it feels like you've been watching for 36 hours.

It's formulaic and predictable. It goes on and on and nothing happens.

There director's idea of action is having the actors pretend they are out of breath.

Midway into this movie they go underground and it's so dark you cant see a thing.

OMG, it's so horrible.

Its obvious most other reviewers arent familiar with fiction. It is a movie about WWI zombies if you were looking for realism then thats your problem and why you wont like most films.

Having said that, this was an ok found footage movie. Nothing new or innovative but perfectly serviceable. The acting is on par with what you would expect from this type of movie decent performances at best. pretty tame zombie effects and gore. The character of the director marcus was terrible and found myself annoyed by almost all of his dialogue and interactions with every other character, but that seems to be the fault of the writing.

So final word is, if you enjoy found footage type films give it a whirl but if not you probably wont find anything enjoyable here. Personally I love the Genre and thought it was middle of the road quality.

Had it been a production of a group of high school kids it would've been perceived as funny and rather a successful first attempt of movie making. But being as this project actually has some established actors in it, one can only marvel at how that came about to be.

The film makes good use of many old tricks and methods in order to scare the viewer without actually showing much of anything. When done properly it can work, however in this case it's just sad and shows clearly how the film budget must've been no more than a couple of thousand euros.

The film is just terrible.

Found footage features depend on one thing above all: believability. Almost every found footage movie begins by giving you some indication that the footage was discovered and "compiled" by authorities, then later leaked to the general masses. In short, it's a documentary. This illusion is generally effective when dealing with anything possible (floods, natural disasters, outbreaks of disease, serial killers), but becomes weak and convoluted when faced with anything improbable (zombies, vampires, ghosts).

As this is a zombie feature, believability is already at stake. The initial implication that this is "real" immediately makes no impression. It comes off as merely routine.

Shortly after, other factors follow that contribute nothing to believability, and yet continue to be standards in found footage movie making:

1. Too many camera angles to be possible for one camera.

2. Sound is too consistent as the scenes jumps back and forth between angles. An impossibility for one camera.

3. Lighting is too good to be real. It's clearly studio work.

4. The camera continually falls into the perfect position for filming, even though no one is thinking about it or even using it.

5. The fact that the camera is still on!

6. There's even a scene where the camera itself is videoed! Are you kidding me? Really???

7. All the digitally induced fuzz doesn't even look remotely real, or even have a reason for happening.

8. There's a soundtrack. Nice of the authorities to put that in so that viewers of their documentary will be more interested.

Then there's the acting, and the plot.. I'll just sum it all up with "It's unconvincing."

All of these little pieces simply do not add up, instead the movie suffers from the greatest weakness a movie can suffer from: It was boring.

Oh, and it finishes with some grinding electric guitar music, which is the only true constant in zombie films.

I happened to stumble upon "World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen" by sheer luck. And being the zombie fan that I am, of course I picked up the movie to watch without hesitation.

But, as most zombie movies go, "World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen" turned out to be another generic zombie movie. Zombie soldiers doesn't hardly seem all that interesting anymore. And shifting the focus from the Nazis of World War II to soldiers from World War I hardly made much of a difference.

This whole movie was essentially one big plot hole. There were so many things throughout the movie that made little sense. For example, the lanterns still had petroleum in them even after almost 100 years of being unattended to, the zombie soldiers had managed to remain hidden in the area for almost 100 years, and the mine field had persisted for 100 years as well. Sure, very realistic. Which then takes me to the zombies. While they looked decent enough and were more than just guys with their faces painted grey, then it was really difficult to take them as serious ravenous undead with that laughable sound they made.

The acting in the movie was adequate, though it was painstakingly clear that the performers were struggling and suffering from having a script that could essentially be boiled down to a single page.

The thing that bothered me the most in "World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen" was the hand-held camera views. That just does absolutely nothing for me. It doesn't add to a sense of it being realistic or that you are feeling like you are there yourself. No. All it does it irritate me because I paid money for the movie, I invest time to sit down and watch it, and I am rewarded with shoddy camera work that I could do myself with my DV camera.

"World War Dead: Rise of the Fallen" is not a particular noteworthy or memorable addition to the zombie collection. I managed to endure it to the very end, but I can in all honesty say that I am not returning to watch it a second time.