By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats | 4.25 cats
Director: Kiah Roache-Turner
Starring: Catherine Terracini | Jay Gallagher | Keith Agius | Leon Burchill | Meganne West
Country: australia
Year: 2015
Running time: 96
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2535470/combined
Jason says: “It’s no bad thing, I say, that WYRMWOOD feels like a season’s worth of an eventful TV series packed into an hour and a half; it’s an exhausting ride at times, but there’s not ten or fifteen minutes anywhere in the movie that don’t come across as exciting or have at least one really cool thing in them. Though making it over four years surely has brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner ready to take a break for a while, it’s one of the rare movies where the audience’s inevitable requests for a sequel seems like a great idea.
“Things kick off quickly, with a light in the sky and something in the air kicking off a zombie apocalypse that quickly decimates Australia, leaving is with a manageable number of initial survivors: Mechanic Barry (Jay Gallagher), his wife Annie (Catherine Terracini), and daughter Meganne (Meganne West); good-natured aborigine Benny (Leon Burchill); crusty middle-aged tinkerer Frank (Keith Agius); and Barry’s sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), whom the others will spend much of the movie trying to track down. Trouble is, she’s already been found by some military types and a mad scientist (Berryn Schwerdt), who are never as helpful as one would hope in this sort of crisis.
“Director Kiah Roache-Turner and brother/co-writer Tristan start things off with a flash-forward that establishes a tone of raucous action, which may be a little overdone as a device but is also a bit nice to have in the back of one’s pocket when events take a turn toward the Walking Dead-variety ‘unbearable price of survival’ misery factory. That doesn’t last too terribly long; the Roache-Turners are soon getting past the point in the middle where it starts to run down a bit – in addition to the justifiably-depressed hero, there’s a little too much ‘evil government/business eager to kill the remains of an already reduced population’ on the other side with little in between – keeping just enough of that edge around to push everyone through the end.
“Around that, the movie is packed with action, starting at a quick pace even after it has jumped back to the beginning and not letting up for the first half hour, but saving the really crazy things for later Great fun is had injecting a little MAD MAX DNA into another familiar genre, and the filmmakers even manage switching up between fast and slow zombies without it ever feeling like they are cheating. The various other twists on the zombie material tend to be entertainingly nuts, full of absurdity that is good for a laugh – it takes a bit of work to justify ‘zombies as rocket fuel’ to oneself – but which also allows for creative action. The filmmakers can stage a fight well enough, with plenty of blood and nasty deaths, but it’s the fact that what happens next might be a little out of the ordinary – or a great deal out of the ordinary – that makes things exciting.
“The audience gets to follow an enjoyable group through the action, the sort that grows on the audience quickly. And while one night initially expect the movie to be built around family; a lot of the fun comes from how Barry and Benny play off each other. Jay Gallagher lets a fair amount of weight rest on Barry without necessarily becoming grindingly intense when it would wear the audience out, and tends to look like he knows what he’s doing during the action scenes. Leon Burchill serves not just as the comic relief but as the guy who is charged with swinging the pendulum back toward the movie being fun and punchy rather than dour. He’s great at selling jokes built around Benny being kind of a goof, if an enthusiastic one, in the middle of an apocalypse without undercutting the fact that there’s real danger going on.
“On the other side, it’s kind of a shame that Brooke spends a big chunk of the movie as a prisoner, because Bianca Bradey grabs the screen whenever given the chance, even if she has to do it while tied to something or trying to make things happen with a grimace. I’m hoping to see more of her. She gets to spend a lot of time playing off Berryn Schwerdt, playing to the balconies as a textbook mad scientist. Luke McKenzie is a bit more restrained as the military type who becomes Barry’s foe, but it’s not the sort of movie where you necessarily want the villains to do much to upstage the heroes.
“It’s hard to believe this is only about an hour and a half long; it gets the audience settled in quickly and then packs multiple movies’ worth of crazy action into what it’s got. Given how homogeneous zombie stories can be, it’s a heck of an accomplishment that I want more of this one, specifically, as soon as I can get it. 4.25 cats
“Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)”
Kyle says: “WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD is a zombie movie. Once upon a time, there was an explanation for a sudden invasion of the undead. Apocalypse? Virus? Chemicals? Outer space? Global warming? No more room in Hell? Metaphor for class oppression? The greatest of the genre, George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), posits the idea that zombies want to return to the place they remember most fondly, so they all head for the local shopping mall. These Australian zombies seem intent only upon dining on flesh, brains and internal organs of the living, even if one of them is caught eating frozen meat right out of the refrigerator package.
“The formula is the same: the undead descend in ever increasing numbers on the living, who flee, try to find impregnable shelter or distant relatives, and try to figure out how to kill off zombies. The signifiers are lots of blood, growling, ugly faces, scary eyes, body parts, things jumping out of shadows, and lots more blood. Suggestions that zombification is airborne are inconsistent, but pneumatic nail guns to zombie heads always work, as do guns blowing out zombie brains and shovels decapitating zombie heads.
“One variant in WYRMWOOD is a mad scientist who plays loud rock ‘n’ roll while conducting experiments on both zombies and ‘the normal’ with nonsterile instruments. Another is the discovery that zombie ‘blood’ is flammable, potentially solving the problem of vehicles becoming immotile. Yet another is the female lead revealed to be a “zombie whisperer”. When the military goons turn out to be the villains, you can just imagine what happens to them. As the Klingons are fond of saying in STAR TREK, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’. 3 cats
“Thursday, August 13, 2015, on Netflix, New York.”