EZMM 2016 Day 8: Re-Kill (2015)

It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.

For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, and 2015.

If you’re familiar with Starship Troopers, then get ready for Re-Kill, a pseudo-found footage zombie apocalypse film that presents itself as a Cops-style television show airing five years after the original zombie apocalypse – complete with commercials. There’s a framing device, however, that follows a sick girl who stumbles home to find her parents gone and the TV on. She starts the recording of Re-Kill (the Cops show) and until the end of the movie we are immersed in that.

Overall, Re-Kill is a solid action zombie film but it’s fairly one-note when we’re following the Re-Kill Cops (R-Division) in the field. They skulk around in the shadows until hordes of running zombies come running, leaping, and howling from out of nowhere and then there’s a never-ending barrage of machine-gun fire, again and again and again. Some cops die, some move on. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Normally, I’d just dismiss this as brainless, but it’s actually fairly high-quality for a film of this nature. Bulgarian director Valeri Milev helms an excellent B-Movie cast including Bruce Payne (Dungeons & Dragons), Roger Cross (The Strain), Jesse Garcia (From Dusk Till Dawn TV series), and Scott Adkins (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) and thanks to a decent budget, keeps the action moving non-stop, even allowing for some character development here and there. There’s also some horrible voice-over work by the “reporter” along for the ride, but that’s kind of expected.

It’s not something that should kill any enthusiasm for the film.

The performances are solid and the action is sometimes hard to follow, but there’s a lot of it.

Oh, and there’s a plot twist in there about the zombies getting smarter and organized or something.

The real enjoyment I got from this film was the format. Re-Kill is the Cops show and it airs on the Outbreak News Channel (ONC), which is kind of what would happen if the Fox Network also ran Fox News programming instead of having a separate news channel.  So we get commercial breaks throughout (the show, it’s explained, is shot live, but on a two-hour delay with drones flying in and picking up footage that is edited on the fly in a van somewhere) for things like Vivodine, a drug that supposedly stops the spread of the zombie infection, or lots of sexy footage of pretty people getting it on, because sex is good for America (sponsored by The Coalition to Repopulate America).

With 85% of the world’s population wiped out by the zombie outbreak that makes sense.

There are also ads for safe and secure walled communities, and another show on ONC – airing after Re-Kill – where ordinary citizens tell the stories of where they were when the apocalypse occurred, in sort of a funny, irreverent version of World War Z (the book).

These commercials and other material are all of a very different tenor than the actual zombie-fighting action, and while both IMDB and Wikipedia only list Milev as director, the actual credits also site screenwriter Michael Hurst as co-director. I assume that he’s the one responsible for the fun, satirical stuff.

Oh yeah, and after the program finishes, we cut back to the “real world” where the government is building a massive, walled “ark” to house the survivors of Outbreak 2, leaving us with an opening for a sequel if enough people are interested.

If that happens, I’d watch it. It probably wouldn’t be that good unless they stick to the satire somehow, but I’d check it out.

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