‘Undead’ should have stayed in the grave
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 7, 2005
In this current golden age of zombie films, “Undead” would seem to be a latecomer. In fact, this gory epic began filming in 2001.
| Zombies down under: A zombie movie from Australia, long on special effects but short on logic. The two main characters are intriguing, but the movie bogs down, as though it had an hour’s worth of material spread out over 100 minutes.
Rated: R rating is for violence, language. Now showing: Varsity. |
It’s from Australia, so maybe it took a while for the movie to travel the globe. Either that, or the special effects (which are copious) were more complicated than usual.
In any case, its lateness is not the issue. This movie’s got other problems.
For one thing, it’s not a spoof, but it has a winking, tongue-in-cheek tone. Perhaps the film’s creators, siblings Michael and Peter Spierig, were aiming for the crazy vibe of the “Evil Dead” pictures, but including dialogue about zombie fish is distracting.
In rural Australia, aliens attack. A combination of heat ray and acid rain affects the local population, turning them into flesh-craving zombies. (Really, is there any other kind?)
A small band of spunky survivors outruns the zombies, at least for a couple of days. A young woman who recently won the local Fish Queen title (Felicity Mason) is thrown together with a burly firearms expert (Mungo McKay). A couple of high-strung small-town cops and a pregnant couple join them.
“Undead” feels as though it has an hour’s worth of material spread out over 100 minutes. The pace is sluggish, and it doesn’t help that the first third is bogged down in an endless farmhouse sequence (evidently an homage to “Night of the Living Dead,” the granddaddy of modern zombie movies).
The look of the film is sludgy, with most of the color drained out. There are a few cool visual ideas, such as a giant wall that runs far up into the sky. And of course, a lot of zombies get toasted.
I enjoyed the two main characters, but my enjoyment of characters in a horror movie only extends as far as they exhibit logic. When people do nonsensical things for the sake of moving the plot along, forget it.
The Spierig brothers come up with a few new ideas at the end of the story, which I would’ve been more intrigued by if I’d understood what was going on at that point.
This is the brothers’ first feature film, after making a batch of shorts. Peter Jackson started out making zombie films Down Under, and he did all right with that “Lord of the Rings” thing, so maybe these guys have a future. But they’re going to have to pick up their game if they want to grab the ring.
