The Horde

Starring: Claude Perron, Jean-Pierre Martins, Yves Pignot

Synopsis:

Four cops go on a quest for revenge against a group of gangsters, holding a fifth cop hostage. They storm a tower block only to be interrupted by the sudden unexplained arrival of thousands of blood-thirsty zombies. The two groups are forced to cooperate to escape.

Sadly, The Horde isn’t one of the best, falling into the bracket of being entertaining but of varying quality. The premise is nothing new and can fit into most genres; two groups who oppose each other, band together to stay alive. There’s an Assault on Precinct 13 vibe to it but it doesn’t plagiarise the movie to too much of an extent. The cops in this movie are just as unlikeable as the bad guys they seek revenge on. The look of the movie is dirty and grimy and the characters blend into this quite well. The direction and cinematography is spot on, giving a true apocalyptic feel. However, I was wondering for the most part, why the movie was called “The Horde” as we see only a few zombies attacking. The title becomes clear towards the end with a frenetic battle that looks like a live action version of the video game “Left 4 Dead”. This is not a bad thing and the highlight of the movie, for me.

The movie is let down through a very tangible sense of racism and sexism that doesn’t belong in this type of movie. The best zombie siege stories are about disparate individuals banding together and overcoming the odds - or not depending on the movie. But The Horde goes too far in a different direction with making the characters very difficult to relate to. I’m not sure that the writer intended the movie to come across like this and instead was going for a display of a lack of standards in the characters but nonetheless the effect is sometimes unpalatable. We have an uncomfortable attitude towards the “heroine”. On one hand the characters refer to her as “bitch” and comment on her being “hormonal” when she doesn’t act according to their wishes and an elderly character calls the invaders “chinks” and dispatches them as if he’s still fighting in a war. I’m not normally sensitive to this kind of thing but the screenplay batters the viewer over the head with it so that it’s difficult not to notice. I found one scene particularly distasteful which shows the treatment of a female zombie. It didn’t play out right and I wondered what the filmmakers were thinking. This is all juxtaposed with the final dénouement that brings into question the very thought of the screenplay being misogynistic. By then will anyone care? It seems to be a film for “blokes” but reaffirms the worst qualities of man during the duration.

There’s also a certain laziness in the screenplay when it comes to the Romero inspired way of dispatching a zombie. Eventually, our clearly mentally challenged group of “protagonists” work out that a shot to the head is needed, only to forget this shortly after and waste vast resources of ammunition shooting at the body mass. At the point you would have thought someone would have been noticing and shouting “Shoot for the head”.

Summary

So, on one hand an entertaining movie , on the other a Gallic piece of horror that blends the worst in people and distracts the viewer from the good stuff with an uncomfortable emphasis on character traits. I recommend [REC] and [REC]2 for a decent foreign foray into the zombie genre, not this.

5 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

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