The Horde/The Zombie Farm/Stripperland/The Bleeding
(2009 – 2011/IFC/Maya/Cheezy Flicks/Anchor Bay DVDs)
Picture:
B/B-/C-/B Sound: B/C/C-/B Extras: C/C+/B-/C- Films: C+/C-/D/C-
Vampires
and zombies have gone hand in hand over the last several years. Both genres are quickly on their way out,
lumbering along toward irrelevancy. Whatever
they harnessed to gain such profile attention is beaten to a pulp here, and
hopefully these and movies like them mark the last gasp of the mass cash-in
we've seen.
The Horde
is advertised as being something for fans of 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but there's just no fun in this zombies-meets-Assault on Precinct 13 mashup. You could do far worse than this French
import, but it lacks a solid foundation or a skillful build to the terror. It's watchable, but there are still better
examples of zombie movies out there... watch this one if you've already
exhausted the options from the big boys in town.
The Zombie Farm reaches back to the true origins
of the zombie genre, featuring humans under the control of a voodoo priestess,
rather than being members of the undead. Steering away from now conventional
reasons for zombification (chemicals, viruses, space activity, etc.) is
refreshing, but this still amounts to a dud of a movie. It putters around for most of its runtime
without anything happening except some boring back story for the female lead
and some half-assed attempts at comedy. A little different from the norm, but still
not worth most people's time, and being so light on horror, it's definitely not
something you'd get to provide the scares at your Halloween bash.
We have a
most unusual specimen in Stripperland...
a parody of Zombieland, a film that
didn't take itself too seriously in the first place. I guess you can compare
the situation to being like what Scary
Movie was to the Scream
franchise, but Zombieland wears its
comedy on its sleeve much more than any of the Scream films ever did; so the decision to make this movie becomes
especially awkward when you consider that it's basically the same movie, just
taken into R-rated territory. Everything
from the stylization of the title sequence to the Jesse Eisenberg-esque
narration has been transplanted here, with the only real differences being that
the zombies are strippers and the jokes aren't funny. Skip it.
Lastly we
get to a little bit of vampire action courtesy of The Bleeding. A
quasi-recognizable cast has been assembled for this turd, but that just serves
as proof of how far their respective careers have fallen, or not gotten a
proper start, rather than give a boost to production values. The lead does his best Vin Diesel
impersonation in this Blade inspired horror action film. He spends the movie waging war on an army of
vampires that have killed his family. Just
like most other new horror, this film is a boring and uninspired insult to
viewers of today.
The Horde and The Bleeding are both presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, The Zombie Farm in 1.77:1, and no
aspect ratio is given for Stripperland.
The quality of the video mostly hovers
around average for each of the films, with the worst example easily being Stripperland. Audio is similarly about average, again with Stripperland falling behind the others
in quality. Each film is presented with
a 5.1 Dolby surround sound mix.
Extras
are relatively standard, with the only commentary track being included on Stripperland. The loser here is The Zombie Farm, which features only a behind the scenes
featurette, while the rest all have trailers and interviews on top of that, and
The Horde even featuring some
storyboards.
I'd say
that you could easily skip any of these films and not lose sleep over it. There
aren't many redemptive qualities here, and the greatest scare they offer is the
chance that you might be bored to death.
- David
Milchick
