Movie Reviews : Pandemic, Hell, Ravenous

I took the two weeks after Easter off work to be home over the school holidays. I managed to squeeze some apocalyptic movies into my allotted couch potato time when impressionable eyes were elsewhere. I promptly lost this post...   Here's what I thought:

Title:  Pandemic
Year: 2016
Director: John Suits
Origin: USA
Mood: Grim
Style: dark First Person Shooter, suspenseful
Apocalypse Type: Zombie plague
Apocalypse Level: Almost absolute. Total social breakdown.
Antagonists: Cannibalistic bite-infecting fast zombies
Protagonists: mixed military civilian Search & Rescue crew
Outcome: Grim.

CDC doctor embedded with a military refuge in LA is sent out on a Search and Rescue mission to extract the team send to a school supposedly full of survivors. Its established her family live in LA and she suspects are still alive. The 5 stages of infection are established: 1) Flu like 2)debilitating bronchitis 3)aggressive and conscious 4) death-like coma 5) fast hyper aggressive zombie. Infection is spread by exposure and bites. S&R crews equipped with biohazard suits including suit radios and helmet cams with green screen night-vision option. Teams include a medical specialist, a driver, a shotgun equipped gunner and a red-shirt navigator.

It is established that a vaccine is available to combat a Level 1 infection but is in limited supply and only available for the Dr. The crew is expendable. A “field infection test” gun is available to determine if survivors are infected. The Crew is sent out in a modified school-bus to retrieve the previous crew and any survivors from the school and along the way are attacked by swarms of Level 1-3 infected, including a honey-pot roadside trap. Combat is handled via FPS style helmet-cam vision which is a decided improvement over hand-held “found footage” handy-cam shakey-cam styles often used in the genre.

Relegated to foot travel and separated, the team struggles to make it back to the compound alive, battling the infected with improvised weapons, the crew locates the Dr’s daughter and eventually make it back to the compound in a scavenged ambulance with heavy casualties. An enjoyable if predictable zombie plague movie with some nice hooks, and not too many “close the damn door” stupid movie trope survivor errors. The medical science may have been flakey and the crew certainly wasn’t a front line unit, but they weren’t pitched as one either but it was a realistic enough “get it done” movie.



Title:  Hell
Year: 2011
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Origin: German-Swiss
Mood: Grim, Gitty  dystopian escape and evacuation road-tip
Style: stark and bleak
Apocalypse Type: Environmental disaster. Drought, famine, scorched Earth
Apocalypse Level: Almost absolute. Total social breakdown. Near total Biosphere destruction
Antagonists: the Sun, other survivors and scavengers
Protagonists: family of survivors
Outcome: Grim.

Final Thoughts: get some effective hand weapons that you can use!

An upswing in solar activity has blasted the Earth, baking the surface, evaporating water leading to widespread drought, famine and death. In typical Mad Max style, survivors scour the wasteland for food, fuel and water in a cramped and stuffed station-wagon with bars on the windows. Goggles and dust masks are all the rage. Desperate survivors battle lone hermits for petrol station supplies and we get an idea that exposure to the sun leads to 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns and blindness rapidly. Some excellent post-apoc scavenging in the checking of toilet tanks and hydronic radiators for good water! Poor personal security movie-tropes made me yell at the screen.

Downed power pylon over-road made for an excellent improv road-block and ambush point, but removing it was not when I would have chosen to teach my child-survivor how to drive. Good scavenge the flipped wreck scene gave an opportunity to “split the party” as well as a chance for a piss-break to establish the adult female got her period and was not-pregnant, contraception being an issue often overlooked in survival movies.  

Raiders kidnap the child and in the ensuing pursuit the male survivor badly breaks his ankle. Taking shelter in a mountain side rail tunnel the female lead sets off alone to rescue her sister and “get help”. She encounters survivors who operate a farm and discover they are cannibals, escaping a “marry-in or get eaten” proposal, the ensuing flight through open ground sheds some of the “sun is a murder ball” tension built up earlier.

The survivors take shelter in a cave in which they find a ready source of water. Survival looks bleak but possible.

Final Thoughts: better married to a cannibal than served to one as dinner

Title:  Ravenous ( Fr. Les Affamés)
Year: 2017
Director: Robin Aubert
Origin: Fernch Canadian
Mood: Suspenseful, realistic setting
Style: believable escape and evacuation road-trip
Apocalypse Type: Infectious Zombie plague
Apocalypse Level: Almost absolute. Total social breakdown. Zombie swarms
Antagonists: Cannibalistic bite-infecting fast zombies
Protagonists: family of survivors with kids
Outcome: Grim.

In the woods in rural Quebec a farmstead is holding out against the zombies by being vigilant, quiet and risk-adverse. Two adult male friends patrol in a pickup truck until lone is lost. The survivor finds a bound woman with a suspicious bite mark who claims it was a dog not zombie. He befriends her and takes her with him. They encounter   a small girl and take her in.  Returning to the farmhouse they encounter a group of zombies building towers out of trash in a peculiar ritual. They accidentally alert the swarm of their presence and their flight leads the swarm to their farmstead. Instead of barricading and bugging-in the opt to bug-out and go cross country to a cold-war bunker they are aware of.

Taking limited supplies from the dwindling larder of the farmstead the survivors make a harrowing flight through woodlands relying on bush-craft and stealth to avoid roaming zombies and other hazards. Good use of hand weapons ( machete and hatchets) to avoid the noisy pump-action shotgun. They escape detection by mimicking the zombies carrying items to the ritual piles and eventually make it to the bunker only to discover its been stripped bare of resources. A note suggesting  a direction to search for more survivors is discovered before the swam arrives and decimates the survivors. (They didn’t close the bunker either).

Final thoughts and lessons: They should have bugged-in where they could. A stocked trap-door cellar would probably have been secure against fast-but dumb zombie swarms.