Survival

I seriously tried my best to give this movie the benefit of the doubt. The last zombie movie I saw was Rise of the Zombies. Rise of the Zombies was a zombie movie with incredibly stupid things like zombies that can swim and climb the Golden Gate Bridge with their bare hands. So when I began to watch "Survival" I thought, "No matter what, this can't possibly be as dumb as Rise of the Zombies." I was right. This isn't as dumb as Rise of the Zombies. But Survival is only slightly less dumb.

I wanted to give the actors some credit. For the majority of actors, English is not their first language. And it is difficult sounding authentic in a language that's not your own when you're acting in a movie. However, the script and story were terrible. No matter how hard they tried, the script and story just tore down whatever attempts they made to showcase their acting abilities.

The movie just was a SyFy channel inspired movie. It's got the music, the setting, the story, the script, the extremely stupid behavior from characters, and even a little CGI blood to remind me of a SyFy channel movie. Stupid stuff in this movie just had me shaking my head. A trained former Navy Seal/mercenary sees two handguns and two AK47 lying beside dead bodies. What does he do? No only does he take the handguns without taking extra ammo, he leaves both AK47s. Or how about the mercenary with the AK47 that sees the zombie coming toward him who has plenty of time to shoot deciding to just stand there and get eaten? And how about the fact that the zombies attack our protagonists with machetes and pitchforks? They are supposed to be in some sort isolated forest near a biological research facility in Poland. Where are the machetes coming from? Are there sugar cane trees in Poland now? This movie is a 100 minutes long. If you took a drink of alcohol every time you saw something in this movie that was stupid beyond belief, you'd have alcohol poisoning by the 45 minute mark. I knew this movie was going to be stupid within the first 5 minutes. But I was wishing it wasn't going to be SyFy channel level of stupid. Looks like I definitely didn't get my wish.

Anything even remotely zombie, and I am there.

And having sat through "Survival", I must say that this is not amongst the worst of zombie movies that I have seen. And given the production value and budget of the movie, then I will say that the movie-makers actually pulled it off quite nicely.

The story, however, wasn't really overly impressive. A business man's daughter is kidnapped and a former US navy is hired to bring her back. Sent to a remote research facility in Poland, it turns out that something sinister has been unleashed here.

Storywise then "Survival" didn't really stand out. And one of the greatest issues that I had problems with throughout this movie was the fact that the infection, zombies, call them what you will, were running around with high mobility, they were utilizing weapons, and some even clutched to throat and abdominal injuries. I didn't know that zombies were capable of that...

The effects were actually adequate and were one of the better things of the movie. However, the zombie make-up didn't really pass as believable, especially not when you cover someone's face with a substance that is so obviously a powder material that even a blind man would go "whoa, that looked awful", and when you forget to apply the powder to the flesh areas of the arms and hands. It is just such a typical low budget zombie movie error to make.

As for the acting, well people were actually doing good jobs with their given roles. But it was hard to buy into the fact that people were supposed to be American or Canadian when they speak with a really thick German accent.

"Survival" is a slightly below average zombie movie compared to so many other zombie movies out there. But it is so obvious that the production value here was wholeheartedly and people were in the movie for their love of zombie movies.

It is worth to sit down and watch "Survival" once, just to check it off the "to-watch-zombie-movie-list". It is adequate entertainment for a zombie movie from Germany, but not really up to par with the 2010 "Rammbock" movie.

If you've seen a few zombie films you're probably better off giving this one a miss, because it is more of the same. A reluctant former special forces soldier is recruited to rescue a kidnap victim. The kidnappers are presumed to be terrorists, and he locates them just like that?

As far as martial arts goes, this guy would give Bruce Lee a run for his money, but usually when a lone warrior is attacked by a group he is overwhelmed at some point, and even zombies aren't so stupid as to queue up to take a swing at a guy armed with a knife, an iron bar, or whatever comes to hand.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that these zombies were the result of a bungled experiment or something of that nature in a laboratory run by a wicked businessman. What else is there to this film? Well, our rescuer has some heavy competition, there are a couple of decent one-on-one fight scenes, and miraculously no one stops to eat, drink or do the other thing during the entire escapade.