Apocalypse of the Dead

Starring: Ken Foree, Kristina Klebe, Emilio Roso,

Synopsis:

Following an incident that causes a deadly chemical to disperse in the atmosphere, people die and rise again to feast on the living survivors. Interpol agents reluctantly battle side by side with the prisoner that they were transporting.

This isn’t the worst zombie film that I’ve sat through. It certainly wasn’t up with there with the best. If we adopt a sliding scale of undead dramas with movies like Day and Dawn of the Dead at the top of the pile, with Oasis of the Zombies at the bottom, this film sits a few notches above the silly Automaton Transfusion.

Ken Foree puts in a decent performance (his first lead acting role in 30 years!) alongside Kristina Klebe and a host of Serbian actors. The Serbs clearly struggle with English and it’s a shame that the movie couldn’t have been subtitled to allow them to speak in their native language. The movie is let down by this, along with a confusing beginning and low budget production values that could have been avoided, if today’s technology had been used correctly.

First off, the sound. Apart from one exception, the dialogue sounds as if it was recorded on set; imagine a hollow, echoey sound to it and that’s what you get. The one notable exception appears to be for the character “Armageddon”. Perhaps the actor Vukota Brajovic couldn’t cope with English at all but his voice sounds as if it was dubbed in during post-production. In hindsight I think all the foreign actors should have had their lines dubbed, along with Mr Foree and Ms Klebe. At least some consistency would have been achieved.

Another major issue I had with Apocalypse of the Dead is the portrayal of the infected. The filmmakers couldn’t seem to decide what type of threat was being faced; 28 Days Later infected? Dead people walking? I couldn’t tell. Also we have shufflers, runners and an odd one that makes strange animal like noises and that waves it’s arms around! It said to me that the filmmakers wanted to tick all the boxes with regards to zombie movie lore as if it was bringing something new to the ever-increasing number of varying quality zombie films. The trouble with this is that the structure of the movie plays along like any other siege based zombie story and will appeal to zombie film fans only, so why bother trying to go over the top with zombie ideas. It isn’t as if the make up FX is wildly different for the runners/shufflers.

Both Ken Foree and Emilio Roso (who plays “The Criminal”) carry the movie and help to elevate it above the zombie movie bottom feeders. What the character of Armageddon is supposed to be, I don’t know and I didn’t really focus on it. I found it a distraction and a deus ex machine to get the major characters out of trouble in one of the final scenes.

The final siege scenes appealed to me, although the budget showed again as survivors got caught in what looked like a school, placing school tables and racks of chairs in front of doors to stop the zombies.

Summary:

We’ve been spoilt lately with some genuinely masterful low budget movies from the same genre; examples being Colin, The Dead Outside and [REC]2, both reviewed separately. So, I’m a little more critical when a movie like this comes along. There’s enough zombie action to interest die hard fans but outside of that community? Best avoided.

4 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

Footnote: Kristina Klebe is involved with the project “Escape of the Living Dead”, along with Kane Hodder, Steve Railsback, and Gunnar Hansen. Written by John A Russo it was announced some time ago. I wouldn’t get too excited as Russo was responsible for the waste of celluloid that is Children of the Living Dead.

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