Movie Review: The Horde (2009)

There have been many zombie movies in the last decade, and now there is even been a television show that features our brain eating friends. I've seen some of them, and they all start to have a similar tone. A virus is spread, and we slowly see the takeover happen as a few ragtag survivors fight to stay alive. This theme really goes back to the original Night of the Living Dead. This is where The Horde takes a different angle.

Buy The Horde [Blu-ray] or DVD

At an officer's funeral, a woman begs a mourner not to do what she knows he's going to do. He's a fellow cop, and he wants revenge. The same goes for a few others. She makes him promise that he'll bring them all back safe, which is just about the time you know that most of them won't.

The Horde starts out as a good revenge flick. The group of cops go rogue and head into a slum to take down the guy who killed their buddy. Things go awry, and they get into a bad tangle with the gang. Out of nowhere, zombies start tearing shit up. There's no explanation for it, no back story, and no reasoning. That's what I loved most about this movie.

Just think about it. If the zombie hordes did start crawling the Earth, people wouldn't expect it. They'd be in the middle of all kinds of things. Some would be watching television, some would be cooking dinner, and some would be in the middle of committing criminal acts. The timing of it all is so cool. You always see people in the middle of mundane acts in zombie movies when it hits. Watching such an intense scene take a snap turn to horror made this different from the average zombie flick.

Of course the cops and criminals have to work together to get out alive, but there is no trust between them. This only adds to the characters and the intensity. Even up to the end, the characters don't try to figure out how this happened. They just realize the situation and deal with it.

The Horde is a total blast. I watched it in French with subtitles. Sometimes that can be tough if the subtitles run too fast or translate poorly, but that wasn't the case here. They ran smoothly and weren't a distraction. I've only watched a few French films, and I've enjoyed them all. Thanks to The Horde, I'm definitely going to seek out more.

6/6/2011