Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A bunch of British lads (including a sleazy Danny Dyer) take their recently divorced mate (Stephen Graham) on a holiday to a remote village. It’s supposed to be a place where the women greatly outnumber the men, which proves problematic when our protagonists are besieged by a horde of raging zombie chicks! Christina Cole plays the lads’ driver/navigator, who proves a problem when the lads want to escape, and she’s already ‘turned’ and waiting for them on the bus.
This Jake West flick is “Heterosexual Zombie Killers” (plus a gay guy) as opposed to the funny but disappointingly chaste “Lesbian Vampire Killers”. In other words, it’s just a generic British attempt to find another “Shaun of the Dead”. I didn’t like “Shaun” and certainly didn’t like this one (Personally, the best of this British horror-comedies of recent years for me has been “The Cottage”). Instead of killing zombies with a cricket bat, this time it’s a soccer ball, which is even worse. And the plot even rips off “LVK” by featuring the same sad sack trying to get over a relationship breakup angle, and the trip to an idyllic getaway that turns out to be anything but idyllic, is also taken from that film. Even when finding its own groove, it’s still boring and unappealing for the most part.
It simply isn’t my thing, hanging around these ‘Beer and a bit of totty’-type of British male youths (hell, they needn’t be British, these sorts of unlikeable and unappealing characters could easily pass for American if you change the accents. Young British ‘lads’ or vacuous American youths, tend to be my least favourite movie protagonists, and sadly they’re far too ubiquitous in horror films. Worse, the characters in the script by Dan Schaffer, end up blending into one another, aside from maybe the token black guy (played by Noel Clarke). Meanwhile, calling the whole film misogynistic would be a massive understatement. Some say the film is about men facing their fears about women, but I reckon that’s way too much of a stretch. Don’t give the film so much credit. Needless to say, I don’t think the film is terribly PC, which would be fine except that it’s also not particularly funny. There’s really only one funny exchange in the whole film, between two of our male protagonists; ‘What kind of virus only affects women?’ The reply: ‘Bird flu’. Now that was funny. Meanwhile, the scene where they mess with the zombies via a remote controlled toy truck is just stupid and pointless.
The one bright spot in the cast is the lovely Christina Cole, who I have loved since the relatively short-lived TV series “Hex”. It still boggles my mind that stardom hasn’t arrived for her because she’s beautiful, can act, and has charisma. What else is necessary? Unfortunately, given the plot of the film, you know she’s not long for the film. The best attribute of the whole film is clearly the gore and makeup. If that’s all you require of a horror film, then you’re going to have a pretty decent time here. It’s plenty gory, with one scene of a zombie with an eye hanging shockingly far out of its socket, being a particular highlight for me. The zombies actually look pretty good, they’re all incredibly ugly. Best of all, the majority of them lurch about like they aren’t used to walking just yet. That’s somewhat ‘realistic’ given they’re recently zombified. The only negative to that is that these zombies appear to be humans who have been ‘turned’ rather than the ‘undead’, so in a way, perhaps that is the wrong approach. Hell, at times it seems like they are more ghouls or cannibals than zombies. But still, they’re interesting and look great.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Overall, if you’re into this kind of ‘British lads’ sort of horror-comedy, you’ll probably enjoy this. For me, I was mostly bored. More Christina Cole would’ve been greatly appreciated.
