The house of the deads 2: contagio finale

28 Days later in the woods, or in Canada. Good location and interesting lumbering footage at first, then the main character and some of the zombies act rather stupidly, then everything starts to sort of seem like the same scene over and over and you aren't even half way to the end of it all.

Characters are happy to find a truck, try to leave, can't, then go back to call on the radio for help.

Then they find another truck easily even though the first truck was supposed to be the only one. It's stuff like this, the movie perpetuates rather than develops, no one takes any logical approach to trying to save themselves.

Then the whole things grinds to a halt in the middle and suddenly they meet a bunch of new characters so we can have people sit around and talk and talk and wait and wait and wait.

Extremely grainy looking, the highlights on actors faces crawl with grain. Actors are okay, zombies seem very very hungry but the attack scenes all look like someone watched Saving Private Ryan too many times, which is easy to do I suppose.

Zombie fans will know all the rip off moments in this film, none are homages this just doesn't have much to offer after the novelty of the location runs out. Also slowing things down are several, we are so sad we just hacked a zombie to death for 2 minute type of scenes. Great drama this is not, please stop stopping to try to make us feel their pain at killing zombies? Canadian tax shelter dollars again at work, like the old days, result is pretty dam dull. Movie seems really long finally grinds to a halt right at the magic number 93 minutes. One of those shortest lengths a movie can be to be sold as a feature. It's a long ass 93 minutes.

In a remote Canadian forest, a group of protesters raise a manifestation against the deforesting. When one worker uses his chainsaw to saw a large tree, its sap drops on his body and he immediately becomes a zombie. When the senior management of the company does not receive any information about the production, the owner and chairman sends his son Tyler (Paul Campbell) to the location to investigate what is happening. Tyler sees both the protester's camp and the sawmill completely abandoned and sooner he finds that the area is surrounded by zombies. He meets a group of survivors leaded by the foreman Mac (Paul Campbell), the protester Rita (Sarah Lind) and the coward biologist Carter (JR Bourne), and Carter explains that he was ahead of a genetic project to increase and improve the production of trees in the area, and the experiment unexpectedly had gone wrong transforming human beings into flesh-eater zombies. Their fight for survival begins.

"Severed" is an entertaining zombie movie, with an original and good beginning. The lead characters are well developed along the story, and with exception of Mac and Tyler, the others are basically scum. The plot point is the revelation of Rita that she had spiked the tree, but the movie becomes dull and boring when the survivors meet Anderson's team. The open conclusion is also very frustrating; maybe the intention of the writer is to give a hook for an unnecessary sequel, but it dos not work. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Infectados" ("Infected")

Take George A. Romero's immortal horror classic "Day of the Dead"; simply replace the brainless macho military men with brainless macho woodchoppers and, ta-da, you've got "Severed". Oh, and the zombie-virus here is inflicted by genetically altered trees that got injected with a growth serum that clearly doesn't function very well. This is a watchable new horror movie with tons of splatter and a handful of effective filming locations, but it's still miles away from being any good. "Severed" completely lacks originality and tension, and I wonder if writer/director Carl Bessai deliberately endeavored to insert every possible cliché of the genre! Any cliché, you name it and "Severed" has it! From the cowardly scientist over the boisterous team-leader with a heart of gold onto the completely implausible romance sub plot, it's all there! Tyler, the son of a forestry company tycoon, is reluctantly sent to a remote testing area to find out why the tree-cutting business has stopped there. Shortly after his arrival there, he vividly discovers that the company's brand new & unethical invention to make trees grow faster turned the majority of lumberjacks into drooling zombies. Before he properly realizes it, the area is hermetically sealed of with Tyler, the remaining cutters and a handful of tree-huggers still in it. There are hundreds of zombie movies out there, and "Severed" simply isn't very memorable. It gets tedious very quick and just when you think the movie is almost over, director Bessai suddenly comes up with a whole new plot about another community of survivors that spend their days aiming guns at the zombies. The amount of gore and bloodshed is satisfying, though. Since we're dealing with lumberjacks here, the undead opponents are attacked with chainsaws, large industrial band saws and, of course, axes. For some reason, the camera makes wild spastic moves whenever there's a massacre going on and, as to be expected, there are no real shock-moments throughout the entire film. The ending is just stupid, everyone around here seems to agree on that, and the majority of the cast-members shouldn't anticipate successful acting careers. "Severed" is a weak film, but enthusiast fans of nowadays horror-smut might consider it worth the price of a rental.

This is just another poorly made zombie movie ripping off the great George A.Romero. And even though the ripping off is bad enough this movie offers nothing original or even very interesting along the way.

While working in a remote logging camp some workers become zombies after being exposed to some sort of experimental tree growth hormone that the logging company is testing.Yeah I know.This may be the silliest reason any zombie movie has ever used to explain why people are turning into zombies.

The writing is about par for a lousy horror movie,some of the actors are decent and some are just awful.The plot is just stupid.This zombie outbreak is very local yet the people in this movie decide to hold up in a rundown shack and later in a fenced compound rather than just hike out of the woods.The special effects are lackluster and unimaginative.Most of the zombie killing is done off screen with blood spraying all over the people doing the zombie slaying.I guess it's easier to spray fake looking blood in someone's face than to fool with showing all the zombie heads being bashed in.Most of the gore in this movie consists of a few bland shots of zombies eating what look to be hunks of Jello off of torsos.People run around and fall in the mud a lot in this movie--I guess the director thought muddy clothes counted as a special effect.

Needless to say this movie is not one to add to your horror collection.It is just another boring and weak horror movie in a long line of such movies.

Please disregard most of the negative reviews here. I'm a 35 year-old horror fan, so I've been around the block and back. I LOVE horror and zombie movies... I love Romero, but also understand that Romero isn't the be all and end all (in fact watch "Last Man on Earth" and then try telling me that "Night of the Living Dead" is original ;) ).

Severed is a GREAT film - the ending is unfortunately rushed, probably due to budget, but PLEASE watch this film and enjoy it for what it is... fun, frantic and suspenseful.

The teens dissing this movie probably reckoned there weren't enough sh!t Saw-style death scenes.

Well done, filmmakers... I'll be looking out for your other efforts.