Main cast: Roger Cross (Sarge), Scott Adkins (Trent Parker), Daniella Alonso (Rose Matthews), Bruce Payne (Alex Winston), Jesse Garcia (Omar Hernandez), Yo Santhaveesuk (Nyguyen), Layke Anderson (Tom Falkirk), Rocky Marshall (Langford), and Stuart Milligan (Captain Macadam)
Directors: Valeri Milev and Mike Hurst
Yay, it’s another outbreak of… something… that turns everyone into zombies.
Okay, in Re-Kill it is never made explicit what triggered the zombie outbreak, but so far it is said to be controlled.
Five years ago, the US government bombed the hell out of San Francisco—it figures that bad things originate from there—before walling up the zombies inside the area formerly known as New York, now called the Zone. In the Zone, who knows how many zombies are walled in, and the world outside are slowly rebuilding.
Forget the zombies, I know many people will say the world is already a better place with those two places bombed to kingdom come or left to the zombies.
Well, there are stragglers and the occasional zombies here and there, which is where the civilian armed force called the R-Division comes in. They are charged to make the rounds every night, taking down zombies and hunting those kept hidden by folks that refuse to put down the zombies that were once their loved ones, these folks kidnapping people to be fed to those zombies.
Wait, do these zombies need to eat? If yes, then how do the zombies in the Zone survive when there are so many of them and no food around?
Anyway, back to the premise: in a world gone mad, old-school things like decency laws are out, so the Outbreak News Network runs a super gory reality show called Re-Kill. It follows the nightly rounds of a R-Division team, showing everything in graphic detail including guts and gore.
Sure enough, it is a no-holds barred show as the opening segment sees an entire team, including the show camera crew, getting wiped out with the exception of Alex Winston, a soldier often mocked for his views that the zombies are a curse from God and there will be an ark for those deemed worthy by God in order to repopulate the world one day.
The bulk of this movie is about a new camera crew—the host Jimmy and the cameraman Bobby—as they follow Alex and his new team, led by Sarge, as they do what is supposed to be a routine nightly round of shoot and kill on sight.
Before long, however, they intercept a truck full of zombies meant for a hushed-up and no doubt sinister scientific project at the Zone, and the team is sent to investigate. Oh boy.
Oh boy indeed, as this movie seems to have some kind of split personality issue.
It has a gimmick: the whole movie plays out like a live TV show, and the movie therefore has “commercial breaks” for some inventive ads to run.
There’s the ad promising a safe and no doubt expensive gated community existence in a thickly walled enclosure manned by “world class sharpshooters”, for example, as well as the ad telling people it’s okay to smoke because the zombies, or “re-ans” as they are called here, will get them first. I also love the one that tells people to hell with it, come order as many antidepressants as you like.
There are also soft-porn ads designed to get people in the mood in order to fast track the re-population attempt. I don’t know if playing those ads during a super violent and gruesome TV show would work as intended, but maybe those folks at that time have been so desensitized to zombie horror that they may even find the whole thing sexy.
However, as the movie progresses, it decides that it doesn’t want to be some kind of satire or parody of zombie movies, and instead morphs into a pretty standard armed meat bags against agile, fast-running, and seemingly invincible zombies.
This “serious” approach is a problem because this movie has many plot holes. The most obvious one is the sending of a small paramilitary team into the heart of zombie land—how does that even make sense? Do the R-Division people hate this team and want them dead or something? It’s hard to take the movie seriously when I keep getting distracted by the number of implausibilities and absurdities in the story.
Also, the whole people with guns versus zombies thing plays out in a predictable manner, because the tropes are out in full force and it’s easy to predict right down to who will die and who will survive at the end of the night. This aspect of the movie feels very by the numbers and generic, a rather tepid retread of the zombie movie formula.
The characters are cardboard-thin; they are tropes on legs rather than anyone I could care about or even bother to remember.
That’s not to say that Re-Kill is a bad movie. The gore is ample, and pacing as well as acting and lighting are all adequate to come together to give me a serviceable zombie movie. It’s just that I feel like I’ve already seen most of everything that is in here already in so many other similar movies out there.
If the movie had played up its more playful and satirical elements, it would have easily stood out from those other zombie movies. This is why it is a huge wasted opportunity: it has what it needs to be something special, but instead it chooses to play out like some generic zombie movie. What are these people thinking? Sigh.
