Movie Review: Zombie Doomsday (2010)

I love the Zombie genre. I mostly have a soft spot for the pre- "Land of the Dead" Romero classics and of course Lucio Fulci's masterpieces, Zombie and City of The Living Dead. Over the past 20 years there have been numerous micro-budget zombie entries. The best being, in my opinion, the ridiculous Redneck Zombies. A micro-budget zombie film isn't that easy to pull off though. The creators of Zombie Doomsday and the documentary of Zombie Doomsday, Another Zombie Flick make a valiant attempt, mixing in some zombie horror with a little shaky POV and a lot of improv. This however isn't the recipe for a primo gut-muncher.

Buy Zombie Doomsday on DVD

Zombie Doomsday was put together very quick. It only took a few weeks before the feature started rolling. The story takes place at a restaurant where a group of folks are barricading themselves from a zombie outbreak. Our main character is an obnoxious reality contestant that makes a trip back to his hometown. He's of course dining in this restaurant while zombie carnage is going on outside. As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of improv which leads to many "fucks" and "assholes" and "fucking assholes". This film appears to be an experiment by what I think is a talented crew. The movie does look pretty good on the technical side even for as brief as the production schedule was. The camera work is effective and there are a couple spots where there is some sense of dread for our unfortunate patrons.



I came into this thinking from the title Zombie Doomsday that this was going to be one of the indie-horror films that people like Chas. Balun would have recommended in Deep Red magazine or even something campy like Todd Sheets' "Zombie Bloodbath" Films. It isn’t. I do admire the effort and the risk they took in making this pretend “Zombie Outbreak” as convincing as possible. It unfortunately just works for about 10 minutes in the film. Zombie film completists might want to check this out along with the feature length documentary, Another Zombie Flick. This just wasn’t my thing, but someone else may see it completely different. I will keep an eye on Tom Townsend and his crew as they put together future projects because as I said earlier, the talent is there...just not the zombies.