Zombie Night Review
I watch a lot of zombie flicks. At least one a week. My love for the genre includes all the B-horror indie stuff, made with a camera you got for Christmas with friends from school. Usually these kind of films know what they are, but the best ones have a bit of originality, and their love of zombies shine through on nearly all of them.
Rarely do I feel the need to comment on a bad zombie movie, as there’s so many out there that it’d take up a lot of my time. But sometimes one comes along that just reeks of failure. ZOMBIE NIGHT is one of those, and I feel I need to warn anybody curious about this embarrassing movie.
I sought this out based on a review on ZMDB.org (the Zombie Movie DataBase) which stated “good acting, plot, cared about the characters, check it out..” but holy crap, now I think surely that was all tongue-in-cheek. It is in fact completely opposite of that. The acting is some of the worst I’ve seen, right up there with ZOMBIE NATION and RISING DEAD. The actors actually stammer their lines sometimes, as if it’s difficult to speak. They’re so poorly delivered I literally cringed a few times (when I wasn’t laughing and rolling my eyes). The actors are like talking stone walls, until the script says “move,” after which, they promptly become stone walls again. Did they just accept all first take shots?
The story is average, nothing new here, but execution is unenthusiastic and extremely bland. From IMDb: “Pakistan and India exchange nukes. Other countries join the fray, and the nuclear fallout causes a plague of the living dead. David attempts to lead a band of survivors from safe house to safe house, hoping to outlast the zombies, while also trying to protect the group from the machinations of a survivor and former member of his party bent on revenge.” I thank the powers that be that this is director David J. Francis’s first film. He obviously had much to learn (he’s done two zombie movies after this one). You don’t care about any of the characters (though you do want Derek [Dwayne Moniz] to make up his mind on staying or leaving; even then you “care” only in that you want the annoyance to be over), and just wait for the gory parts, of which there are few. Though it is decent enough special effects for such a low-budget film, as far as that goes. There’s a couple topless scenes, but other than that, fucking yawn.
I give this 2/10 failures. I was glad when it was over, and I wish I could wash this movie off of me. Let this movie be a cautionary tale to other micro-budget filmmakers: this is how it’s NOT done, guys.
You can get Zombie Night on Amazon and rent it on Netflix. There’s also a sequel called ZOMBIE NIGHT 2: AWAKENING which is only slightly better.
