Plan Z

You can't cover up bad acting and terrible special effects by shaking the camera more and more. There are segments that I don't know why they bothered filming because they shake the camera so much you can't tell what you're looking at. Skip this movie if just ate. Better yet, skip this movie altogether

A bit bored this afternoon and this drew my attention on Prime. It is low budget and there are probably more continuity errors than I care to remember. However the characters are all believable with no-one thinking they are Rambo. They also handle the various situations in a believable way.

If you can have a believable zombie movie, this is probably close to it. Gritty, lots of blood and different to just about every Hollywood zombie movie.

I'd checked out quite a few reviews of this from fellow Letterboxd-ers and, while managing to avoid any serious spoilers, it was already very clear what the consensus of opinion was on this film.

Now I'm not the sort of awkward pedant who'd pretend to hate it because it was popular and easy, to make me look all dangerous and interesting ... but I would argue my reasons for liking unpopular films (such as R.I.P.D, Daredevil (with Ben Affleck!) even Batman and Robin which my brother loathes and I always stick up for, just to piss him off - if explained clearly enough and with reasonable examples for the basis of your opinion, then who am I to tell you, you're wrong?!

In spite of all the above, I actually found this hilarious.

Found myself take an immediate dislike to the way He carries himself in front of the camera, speaks in a Michael Madson-esque lazy drawl and just instantly rubbed me up the wrong way.

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, I appreciate a good villain. However in this, he's the 'hero'? Nah... really?

What would he do if the zombocalypse occurred when he was off on one of his international photography jaunts? Hadn't planned for that had you smartypants?

He comes across like some kind of Badly Drawn Boy/Chuck Norris hybrid, even when he's just heard the grisly sounds of people being torn to bits and eaten right outside his front door. I contemplated how it would have affected the film if the main man was Ewan Bremner, playing it like Spud. Instead of barely raising a designer-scruffy eyebrow when coming to terms with Zombocalypse, he'd be running around, crying, swearing and shooting up smack.

This would have made it a brilliant film.

Ps - If nothing else, I am grateful to this film for introducing to me to John Fairhurst whose bruising groove 'No Shelter' (wow! It's like they gave it some thought) blew me away. I'm off to Emusic now to see if they've got his stuff included in my subscription.

This movie was clearly made on zero budget, as akin to the previous similar zombie effort of Colin, as such you have to consider this and appreciate how much of a movie this actually turned out to be.

There is tension and compelling action, and the whole thing doesn't feel like filer, despite most of it taking place in a couple of small locations. The narration can get annoying but you can see that it is what stitches the filmed scenes together and is necessary. The effects mainly rely on editing and imagination, but again with no budget this makes sense. Generally the editing and directing are what make this any good. The only flaw is the writing, it is quite simplistic and the point of 'survival vs fighting back' is repeated over and over again despite the filmmakers message becoming clear about a third of the way into the movie.

Overall this isn't a bad effort considering the clear lack of budget, there have been a lot worse zombie movies made with a lot more to work with, so definitely worth a watch if you are looking to make something for nothing yourself.

As other reviewers have noted this film was done on a low budget but they made the most of it. It's a decent character study. It certainly deserves more than a 4.8.