Friday, October 14, 2011 Z is for Zombie: A is for Apocalypse of the Dead


A is for Apocalypse of the Dead
Serbia, 2009

The Zombies: Romero Ghouls, with a couple of random Snyder Sprinters.

The Source: Ancient plague exposed to ammonia (?!?)

The Result: A rehash of other, better movies in an Eastern European accent.


This film even put the zombies to sleep.

A Yugoslavian construction crew unearths an ancient plague pit in the 1980's.  Thirty years later, a Serbian railroad tanker  is ruptured by an inebriated American soldier in town for a UN military exercise.  A strange gas escapes from the tanker and zombifies the local populace.  Survivors from various walks of life - including a group of Interpol operatives transporting a mysterious prisoner - band together to fight off the undead and make it to the end credits.

This one was literally painful to watch.  As the directors decided to use shaky cam for every damn scene, they had to resort to incessant crash zooms in and out to spice up the action moments.  Trying to keep my eyes focused on anything happening in the movie caused my work-induced headache to blossom into a full-blown migraine.

Apocalypse of the Dead is a Serbian production shot in English.  Aside from mistaking camera movement for dramatic tension, this is the film's biggest hurdle.  As language ability seems to have been the primary hiring consideration, the acting ranges from acceptable to embarrassingly amateurish, with the chap playing the professor deserving special mention for ineptness*. Throughout the film are scenes in which half the actors are dubbed and the rest are recorded on-set, which is a bit disconcerting until you get used to it.  (Yet for some reason, a trio of mush-mouthed party-goers get to keep their original voices intact.)  And even the native speakers sound uncomfortable in English due to having to work with screenwriters and directors who were not entirely facile in the language. The dialogue for the religious fanatic is particularly grating, and not in the way the writers may have intended.

The decision to shoot in English might have been a marketing call, but I think there's plenty of evidence that the guys behind the camera were simply big fans of American zombie movies. There's a lot in-joke character names and some rather clunky references to other (better) films. Apocalypse also brings together more action movie stereotypes than an RPG player character group - the badass American cop, the mysterious stranger with a katana, the two-gun hottie, and the psycho killing machine. And then there's the presence of Ken Foree, iconic for his role in the original Dawn of the Dead but not what you would call a zombie movie staple. 

Trouble is, Apocalypse takes it's love of other zombie films too far. It follows a well-worn path without adding anything new.  It's almost as if the directors are working from a checklist; the character that gets bit and dies a slow but noble death, the character that goes crazy and throws herself into a pile o' zombies, the character that betrays everyone else in an attempt to save his own skin, etc.  The only new and interesting gag is the scene pictured above, where the survivors come across a bunch of undead sprawled out in the sun.  But the movie doesn't really do anything with this concept, except set up a poorly-executed take on a memorable scene from Aliens.

I can't make up my mind if Apocalypse of the Dead is a homage to American zombies films or a calculated rip-off of them. I can say that if the filmmakers had tried to be a little more original and, well, more Serbian the results would have been infinitely better.  And for the love of Cthulhu, STOP WITH THE DAMN SHAKY CAM!


Worst. Pagliacci. EVER!

Half a ghoul for good intentions, half a ghoul for hiring Ken Foree, half a ghoul for making a drunk American directly responsible for the apocalypse.


1.5 Ghouls


*His performance took me back to 80's Hong Kong action flicks and the 90's Godzilla series, where random gweilo/gaijin were hired for key roles simply because they looked European and understood the local language. Acting ability was not required in those cases, either.

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