Road of the Dead

It was a thrill ride just like Mad Max Fury Road, with a team of strangers teaming up to survive the Zombie apocalypse that's going down. One of the best and craziest Zombie movies I've seen. It's exactly the roller coaster I would expect from the land down under.

Unlike Fury Road, however, the story is lacking. It's not a good ridiculous it's more of a stupid ridiculous

The filmmakers make it seem like the story is unimportant, which is true. No one needs to know why Zombies exist only that they do and Wyrmwood totally goes out there with the genre.

The weak story does not overshadow the amazing action, set designs and costumes in the movie, as well as the ensemble cast.

It was so much fun to watch.

WYRMWOOD is a high energy zombie flick from Australia that combines the road movie genre with a classic zombie apocalypse outbreak type horror yarn. It has a little of the verve of VERSUS but in the end I found it quite predictable and a little overwhelming.

What's clear from the outset is that this is one step up from being an amateur film. The look of the zombies is cheap, especially with those Halloween party contact lenses, although there's copious gore to help make up for this. The acting is of a generally poor quality, but the film goes for a semi-serious approach so that doesn't matter too much.

What WYRMWOOD does offer is action in spades. There's barely any plot, just a handful of characters battling both zombies and some sinister scientists bent on human experimentation. None of it made much sense to me, but the director works hard to infuse his film with vibrancy and momentum, and he does succeed in part.

Before the multitude of the crappy zombie movies you've seen lately, back in the day in 1992, Australia was producing a zombie movie that remains cool even today, made by a little known New Zealander called Peter Jackson. It mixed zombies with comedy, original ideas and wacky Aussie characters.

23 years later Wyrmwood is an obvious homage to Braindead, but adding a few elements of its own. The main character, almost a dead ringer for Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead, is trying to get to his sister's place in the middle of a zombie plague. Not only are there zombies everywhere, but petrol has become not flammable. The only solution: rig a car to the gasses that zombies breath out and make an armored truck running on zombies. Meanwhile, the sister is being captured by sadistic psychopath military types in order to experiment on her.

There are many references to cult films, like The Evil Dead and Mad Max, and the ending of the film leaves a lot of place for sequels. This is not a perfect film, but considering that it is an Australian zombie movie made with unknown actors and probably a low budget, there was no chance it could have been. Instead we are treated to a wonderfully original film, made by people who clearly enjoyed playing with the genre and love the same movies that we do.

Bottom line: more than anything, this is a fun film. If you liked Braindead or The Evil Dead you will like this one as well. It opens an interesting idea, also used in the season finale of Z Nation, of the zombie whisperer. People die or live based on luck more than anything and it is refreshing to see this in an era when nobody ever dies, for fear of antagonizing the viewers. I recommend it, I enjoyed watching the film!

The script comes off as a bit far-fetched at times and some if the CGI is downright comical. However, nothing prepared me for the atmosphere Wyrmwood created. Whoever was responsible for costumes and props did a knockout job, absolute best work I have seen in recent zombie flicks. The sweat poured into minute details makes this film a must see for anyone who enjoys zombie culture. Wouldn't be surprised to see a cult following.

With that said, the script is a little devoid of direction. The director knew what this film was about and didn't try to make it into something it wasn't. You should be ready to sit down and watch characters doing quite literally whatever comes next as a zombie apocalypse unfolds. I didn't recognize a single actor in the film, but I was blown away by the work they put into their roles. You could tell everyone involved just wanted to make a great movie.

Entertaining, exciting, and funny, could not recommend enough.

Okay this is the best zombie action I've seen in some of time; whereas The Battery was hip and careful, this is sloppy, has verve and gleefully throws itself around, it has a carpenter's love for things you can build with your hands that I like and just an overall air of messily practical filmmaking in the best spirit of Evil Dead and Braindead that just wants to revel in blood it throws up.

And this means that it doesn't try to make too much sense. A zombie apocalypse has taken place overnight following a meteorite shower, but the mythos is schematic and unserious, we see a few soldiers roaming the countryside in a van and a deranged scientist conducting zombie experiments in the back but this is so we can have these characters roaming around. The notion of a girl who comes to control zombies and emotive moments here and there I could do without.

And New Zealand is the ideal backdrop for the appeal this aimed to have; we see no cities and no cohesive social fabric being torn, there are only roads through sparse New Zealand bush, a garage here, a tunnel there, forests, so it all adds to that feeling of a bunch of young people letting loose with no larger narrative in mind other than the adventure of making up things in the wild.

Creativity here is not intellectual or really concerned with style, or bogged down in somber atmosphere; it is practical and freewheeling, the joy of splashing blood on a floor, slipping on it and filming the goof, what Raimi and Jackson did so well once upon a time. By the end the only fault I see is that they didn't push this gory slipperiness more, that they didn't make the sparse setting more iconic (Evil Dead and Braindead, and really every horror classic, are rooted in extremely memorable space) but this is still horror I endorse.