The Horde (2009)

A bunch of cops (including one female, played by Claude Perron) bust into the apartment of some Nigerian crims (particularly drug dealer Eriq Ebouaney and his brother Doudou Masta) who killed one of their own, and a tense standoff is ended with the realisation that they are going to have to temporarily put their differences aside (extremely reluctantly, I might add) to ward of the horde of flesh-eating zombies currently surrounding the building. Yves Pignot turns up as the cantankerous, racist old superintendant, who takes a delight in blasting the crap out of the undead.

This French zombie flick has a lot of admirers, and I was looking forward to it. Having now seen it, I can honestly say you're all insane. It's a complete bore. Dawn of the Dead it most certainly ain't. Directed by Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher (who also co-wrote the film together with Arnaud Bordas and Stephane Moissakis), the film has a cops and crims vs. zombies scenario that on paper sounded potentially interesting. Unfortunately, it plays out anything but interesting because neither the cops or crooks are remotely interesting or even moderately likeable. Not only do the cops not like the crims, but they don't get along amongst their own kind, either, it seems.

The only character in the entire film I found halfway interesting was the racist old man played by Yves Pignot. Think about that, people, but at least he added flavour, humour, and personality. At least he's not taking this nonsense seriously, unlike the others. The rest of the characters are only distinguishable by skin colour, gender, and whether they're a cop or crim. When the characters die, one doesn't care about any of them because there's no investment in them whatsoever. I usually harp on about boring twenty something characters in horror flicks who booze it up and carry on in ways that I neither appreciate nor understand. This isn't an interesting alternative, I'm afraid. Personally I think the benchmark for horror/sci-fi flicks with a large cast of characters is something like Aliens, where just about everyone had a distinguishable personality and most were genuinely interesting even if they weren't especially likeable. Worst of all, the character to survive the longest is completely unlikeable, borderline hateable.

If you like your tough gangster flicks, you'll probably like this more than me. But I spent most of this film thinking that the action that was going on outside was looking far more interesting and visually stunning than what we were seeing inside the apartment building. The real movie was outside (it looks like Hell on Earth), and sadly we don't really get much of it. What we do get is boring and one-note, even the action (The budget was clearly 90% spent on squibs). The best thing in the film aside from the old man are the zombies. And that's a problem, don't you think? The zombies aren't in it as much as they should be but when they are, they sure are a wonderfully rabid horde and damn-near indestructible. Best of all, we actually see the transformation from dead human to undead zombie, which isn't often shown in zombie flicks, I reckon. And thankfully there's not a whole helluva lot of shaky cam nonsense.

Even the overrated Dead Snow is better than this tired, monotonous affair which like the similarly overrated Versus plays more like an action film than a horror film. A tedious one. Actually, it's like watching someone else play a shoot 'em up computer game. A tedious one. Like I said, lots of people like this film. You might be among them. I'm not. This just wasn't very appealing to me, I needed more substance to say the least.

OVERALL SUMMARY
Extremely violent and bloody, with interesting zombies but no remotely interesting human counterparts for the audience to latch on to. Boredom ensues.