Trying to get by in school, a student returning home to his mother finds a zombie outbreak has infested their apartment complex after spreading throughout the city, forcing them to rely on their survival skills while awaiting a military intervention looking for a cure.
While it doesn't bring anything new to the scene, it still has some likable moments. These are mostly centered on the frenetic and high-energy action scenes centered on escaping or combating the ravenous zombie hordes. The initial scenes of the outbreak where the students turn, forcing him to be ruthless and selfish to get out of the infested halls, while other students are incredibly well, as he tries to get to safety, while his classmates and teachers are overrun. Later scenes involving him trying to escape from the individual zombies in the apartment, hindering his quest for food or other supplies where the zombies are or an escape attempt taking both his mom and the other friend in the apartment to a safer location have a lot to like. Trying to utilize smarts to keep the creatures contained or distracted in equal measure while also focusing on their ferocity and intensity, there are some genuinely chilling and outright suspenseful sequences featured. That it also manages to introduce the concept of the zombies' intelligence in recognizing others who suffer from any form of brain damage gives this some intriguing touches to hold and adds more depth to the film than expected. It's a solid idea that also touches on the age-old zombie film trope about their desire to eat human brains. As the creatures are shown the ability to look at victims and determine if they have a physical or medical form of damage to them, it makes sense that the less appealing target gets ignored. However, beyond that, the film doesn't have much going for it. That's mainly due to the straightforward storyline that never deviates all that much from expected norms within the genre. The outbreak occurs, the heroes get to survive the encounter, and then become stuck trying to find a true means of escape away from the creatures while the military investigates matters on the side. This is all general plot points and story beats that dozens upon dozens of genre fare have utilized over the years, which doesn't do much to distinguish itself from this one. The action is technically well-handled and comes off as chilling, but it doesn't do anything differently other than the bit about different strains and how they recognize patterns for who to attack. Still, the rest of the film manages to hit the same expected notes and setups that are quite predictable given how it follows the format of the genre. As well, this one also suffers from several other distracting factors. The simplistic story means that it conveniently forgets several big factors towards explaining the zombie virus when it matters to the context of the scene. The outbreak of the virus is brought up once and expected to be the main point carried throughout here, yet it never makes any connection to the rest of the film after being brought up. There's far too much about how the mother has an immunity to her Alzheimer's, yet that gets dropped simply for a suspenseful attack scene when it needs to. Making the reckless older brother a villain for the sake of injecting a human villain rather than dealing with the zombies, yet his motivation for doing so is quite underwhelming. It all helps to lower this one overall.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.
