Colin

You can tell they only had a forty quid budget ... worth a watch tho! Just don't the forty quid budget! I gave up Parasite to watch it! Always tomorrow night I guess!

All of the recent coverage of this film in the mainstream print press has inspired the expectation in many (myself very much included) that it has somehow transcended its origins as a film that cost 40 quid to make. It hasn't.

Looking exactly as you'd expect a £40 zombie movie to look (replete with a complete disregard for cinematography, alarmingly hammy acting and plenty of unconvincing, off- colour bloodletting) Colin is an extraordinarily hard slog. This is particularly true of its opening half hour, which is almost totally bereft of dialogue and filled with way too many ugly and aimless shots that last at least four or five times longer than they need to, without any justification.

Despite the odd moderately impressive exterior shot, Colin's "story" is one constructed around the constant need to justify the shooting locations - which are all, for the vast majority of the time, someone's drab and under-lit living room. The finale, which bucks this trend by taking place in someone's garden, is five utterly exhausting minutes of ketchup, shaky-cam and non-stop shouting; the sheer, belligerent pointlessness of which angered me so much that I almost flung a shoe through my TV.

Spades of kudos must go to the enterprising young sprouts who clearly worked like dogs to get this film made, and I'm thrilled to live in an age where filmmakers of this level can get their work seen and distributed nationally on DVD, but to be brutally honest this is film-making of an extremely sloppy vintage, and the complete lack of plot renders it monumentally, deadeningly boring.

A friend of mine remarked that he'd rather sit down in front of a decade's worth of his neighbour's holiday videos than sit through Colin again.

Ditto.

Made for £45, my arse! This film's laundry bill alone would have amounted to more than that (fake blood doesn't come out of clothes by itself, you know), let alone all the other costs that are unavoidably incurred during the film-making process, no matter how cheap the production: catering, administration, travel, make-up supplies etc.

Sadly, Colin's clever '£45' marketing ploy turns out to be the most effective thing about the whole film. Despite a valiant attempt to try something different with the whole living-dead schtick, and for seriously less dosh than most low-budget horrors, most of the time the film proves to be a less than scintillating experience, the basic idea being far more suitable to a 10 minute short than a 97 minute feature.

Watching recently turned corpse Colin (Alastair Kirton) slowly dragging his feet around South London for an hour and a half, pausing to contemplate road signs or traffic lights on the way, is pretty dreary stuff. Director Marc Price occasionally picks up the pace, such as when Colin stumbles upon a house siege or a group of survivors take action against the undead (resulting in a unsettling scene where those wounded during the battle are cruelly dispatched before they can become zombies), but for the majority of the time, this is dead boring.

Colin is bitten by a Zombie; he dies, returning from dead and tackles what every zombie has to deal with, the living.

A poor mans micro-budget zombie film that is less effective than the low budgeters Autumn (2009) and Zombie Diaries (2006). Allegedly shot for £40 (even though petrol would cost more than that in UK to get to each location filmed).

Some of the make up is well executed. Alastair Kirton gives a good zombie performance as Colin and the supporting cast are fine. Nevertheless, the filming suffers from problems of most low budget movies. That said, director/writer Marc Price does his best with what he has and credit to him for the film reaching such a wide audience.

Overall, interesting film making which tries to stir emotions for 97 minutes.

Colin (Alastair Kirton) arrives at his friend's home holding a hammer and covered in blood. He washes a savage wound in his arm before being attacked by his friend, now one of the undead. Colin kills the zombie before slowly turning into one himself. Once turned, Colin embarks on a journey of discovery amongst an apparent zombie apocalypse. He finds a taste for human flesh but rarely attacks. He is mugged for his trainers before being rescued by his sister, who he then mindlessly bites. We then follow Colin across a chaotic city, where the humans seem to be more savage than the zombies.

The story of Colin is really quite remarkable. Apparently made for £45, director Marc Price shot the film on a ten-year old camcorder and used social network sites to gather willing actors. When screened at various horror festivals, the film attracted the attention of various production companies and Colin went onto having a limited cinema release. When Danny Boyle released 28 Days Later (2002) and re-invented zombies as fast, scary and fuelled by rage (rather than a taste for flesh), the zombie genre was given a new lease of life. Even zombie legend George A. Romero got back in the game and made the okay Land of the Dead (2005). They are still as popular now as they were back then, and the straight- to-video market especially is plagued by them. It has become slightly tiresome and formulaic. The success of Colin stems from the fact that it does something wholly original and tells the story from the zombie's point of view.

Colin admittedly looks terrible - but when you shoot a film for the same price as a video game then that can certainly be forgiven. This is by no means a great film, but it's certainly interesting, and has some inspired moments. In the early scenes, Colin wanders the streets and finds some building blocks which he eyes with recognition and confusion, and later finds an iPod which he listens to for a while before discarding. It adds new dimensions to the zombie which makes a nice change from seeing them being blasted away (although that is also fun). The camera-work can certainly be irritating, as sometimes it's hard to work out what is actually happening, but again, this can be forgiven. I'll be interested to see what Price goes on to do after this, as he's made the most likable and sympathetic zombie since Day of the Dead's (1985) Bub.

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