Immensely popular (even with a lot of critics) Aussie horror flick sees meteorites crashing in the fishing town of Berkeley, and causes zombies to rise and cause havoc and bloody death. Humanity’s last hope includes gun-toting, brooding fisherman Mungo McKay (apparently his real name, poor lad), incessantly foul-mouthed slimy cop Dirk Hunter and his quieter partner, an expectant young couple, and small-town beauty queen (who is really quite skanky if you ask me) Mason, who proves surprisingly resilient.
Vastly overrated, ‘Brain Dead’/’Dead Alive’ wannabe is uneven like that film was, but at least Peter Jackson’s cult classic had great moments, and a butt-kicking priest. This rather dull film just proves yet again that us Aussies stink at making genre pictures, I mean when a film about a giant killer pig stands as one of your finest genre outings (What? You prefer the dull psychic thriller ‘Patrick’?), it really says something, doesn’t it? (Especially when that film was made some twenty odd years ago as well).
This is unfunny (then again so was ‘Shaun of the Dead’, maybe it’s just me), weird (generally, alien zombies are a bad idea, I mean, what’s wrong with our own Undead? Not sure what that huge metal structure was, either), sometimes bordering on incoherent, and full of characters you’d probably like to take a big chunk out of yourself after ten minutes. Agonisingly boring at times. The cheap, cartoony music score by Cliff Bradley doesn’t help, either.
And yet, it’s not all awful (though I’m tempted to give it zero simply for being the millionth film to infuriate me with that whole tired John Woo two guns thing- ugh!). The zombie makeup and gore is not only plentiful, but actually very well done for an ultra low-budget film, the production looks quite slick (aside from some bad alien FX presumably done on a laptop), with the cinematography doing wonders to make the film look more expensive than it probably was. In fact, the zombie action was all that was keeping me watching, including a wonderfully nasty hole through some poor cricketer’s gut, and I swear I saw a zombie with glasses that looked an awful lot like me. But after about five minutes of Hunter’s incredibly nauseating, juvenile character, I was in sheer agony. McKay’s triple-barrel shotgun was cool, but his attempt at a Clint Eastwood impersonation was quite forced.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Aside from the dorky-looking aliens, this is a better-looking production than most Aussie genre films, but a poor script, bad acting, and lot of dull stretches between the gore sink this to mediocrity (and I’m being generous, given Australia Day has just passed, so don’t call me Un-Australian, either). Watch ‘Razorback’ instead.
