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| Review by Rich Redman |
A new street drug, NATAS, is sweeping the world. It transforms people into flesh-eating animals. Most of them are mindless. Some of them have an animal cunning.
Eventually, civilization collapses.
One nameless man, nicknamed Hunter by some survivors, cruises through the post-apocalyptic landscape killing Flesh Eaters, drinking tequila, and running from his past. He crashes into a group of survivors.
Just as he’s starting to feel welcome, Flesh Eaters attack and the whole group has to run to survive.
I have= to say that this movie grew on me slowly.
It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but by the end, I was glad that I watched it.
Here are some things that make it bad:
The story is weak
The drug is given lots of supernatural play initially (NATAS is “Satan” backwards), but the script never goes anywhere with it. There are giant CGI monsters in addition to the humanoid Flesh Eaters, but no explanation of what they are or where they came from.
The dialogue needs a re-write
There are too many places where characters say the same thing multiple times in the same bit of dialogue, or say one thing and then say something contradictory. Either say you don’t know, or say you’ve been hiding out there about three months. Don’t say both.
The actors are of varying calibers
Martin Copping, as the man nicknamed Hunter, and Clare Niderpruem are fine in their roles. Danny Trejo, as the axe-wielding priest Jesus, is underutilized. None of the other actors are quite up to their skill levels. If those dialogue mistakes are from improvising, you need better actors. If you can’t afford them, don’t let them improvise (or hire a brilliant editor).
The voice-overs are bad
The actors are fine, but as we all learned from Bladerunner (except, apparently, these filmmakers), voice-over should be unnecessary. When they add a second person’s voice-over, it just gets worse.
The CGI blood spatter on the camera is overdone, and it doesn’t match the rest of the movie
Granted, most of it is Flesh Eater gore, but if you’re going to have tons of blood, then go for it! If you can’t afford a lot of makeup, prosthetics, and physical effects, then don’t.
All of those things irritated me as a I watched, but as I let the film run (hey, it’s October, Crazy Uncle Rich watches a lot of monster and horror movies in October), they began to cohere.
The stupid looking car Hunter drives, with the hood that partially blocks his field of view? The grainy film stock? The actors who are either impassive or wildly overacting? A man-with-no-name main character? Characters survive explosions and fire? I suddenly got it: I was watching a tribute to ‘70s horror movies from Italy or Spain.
I used to watch those kinds of movies as a boy, when edited versions ran on TV. I watch them now, when old “gems” make their way onto DVD or on-demand cable services. Zombie Hunter is clearly a tribute to those films, and everyone in the cast and crew was clearly on the same sheet of music.
The context is weak, as I mentioned, but all we really need for context is zombie epidemic destroys civilization. We’re not going to get character development, and we shouldn’t care. Nobody cares about greatest fears or greatest desires.
There are some really good scenes in here, and the movie does handle action well. Hunter’s shoot-out in the convenience store shows us his fighting skill and character, and demonstrates zombie cunning (and it’s one of the best uses of voice-over in the entire film).
When Hunter and Bill go to salvage Hunter’s car, we get to see that Hunter was not overly injured by either his injuries from a car accident, or his gunshot wound.
The zombie break-in to the survivor camp provides some poetic justice, but is also genuinely tense and fast-paced.
The fight at the airfield was the big, climactic, battle. I didn’t expect anything new about character or context, and that was fine. In a survival horror movie like this, all the characters are at risk in the final battle, so that’s all I needed.
The one action sequence that seemed extraneous, and frankly not up to the rest of the scenes, was the one in the village of crazy survivors, where the clown serial killer chases the survivors. It does tell us something about context and other survivors, but it comes too late in the movie for that to matter. It kills off an unimportant character, Daisy, but otherwise doesn’t develop anything. That one could have been cut, and Daisy could have joined the fight at the airfield.
If you want to watch a modern tribute to old classics, Zombie Hunter is a good bad movie. Check it out!
