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, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Ten years ago, Dr. Girlfriend and I kicked off the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon (because, you know, the resurrection!) and for the tenth anniversary marathon, we’ve decided to go back and rewatch some of the best films from (nearly) every year. We had to make a few cuts here and there to have time to end the week with a tribute to the late, great George A. Romero on the 50th anniversary of the release of Night of the Living Dead.

Editor’s Note: Due to technical issues, Day 3’s Dead Snow Double Feature has had to be shuffled.

La Horde tells the tale of a group of corrupt cops who, after the murder of one of their own, decide to take the law into their own hands and bring down the drug dealers responsible. As bloodily and violently as possible. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned and they are instead captured by the Nigerian drug lord. And then the dead rise, as they are wont to do, and the survivors must fight their way through the zombie horde.

If you’ve seen Punisher: War Zone, The Raid: Redemption, or Dredd, you get the general gist of the film. Lots of level-by-level ultraviolence. Granted, at the time of release, only Punisher: War Zone had played with this scenario (in 2008), but only as a climax. In retrospect, La Horde feels a lot like a trial run of 2011’s The Raid: Redemption – particularly the fight scenes. They’re not as well-choreographed or executed as The Raid, but they’re visceral and bloody, which is a very good thing.

This is a great example of first-time feature filmmakers (Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher) taking a swing and knocking it out of the park. Well, that’s a bit over-the-top. It’s not a home run, but it’s a very nicely done film that lays good, if brief, groundwork as a crime drama before jumping into the gruesome apocalyptic zombie nightmare.

If it wasn’t for all the people speaking French, I’d have been hard-pressed to identify the country La Horde was set in. It stands in stark contrast to our opening night film, Les Revenants in that if there was ever a foreign zombie movie that I’d expect to be remade in the US, it would be this one. There’s also not a philosophical bone in this film’s body.

It’s a serious attempt at an action/drama film, and while there is humor, it’s dark gallows humor that almost entirely comes from the appearance of the crazy old bastard Rene (played with gusto by Yves Pignot) who keeps calling the zombies The Chinese and takes great joy in gunning them down with a machine gun.

The dramatic tension isn’t just between the cops and the crooks, however. The lead cop, Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins), doesn’t just blame the Nigerians for his buddy’s murder. He also blames the female cop, Aurore (Claude Perron), for getting in his head and making him sloppy. On the crooks’ side, Bola (Doudou Masta) is sick of being treated poorly by kingpin Adewale (Eriq Ebouaney), and finds himself siding with his friend, Greco (Jo Prestia) against his countryman.

The two groups have to work together if they’re going to survive, of course. And, as expected, things don’t go quite as planned. The ultimate goal is just to get to the basement and find a way to escape. However, it’s not Aurore’s ultimate goal. While none of it is terribly original, the material is attacked with energy and believability. The zombie attacks are frenetic and gory and there’s almost none of the psychological and/or existential dread of Les Revenants. This is more about the action and the violence than about the mind. As such, it’s a nice contrast.

As the film goes on, there’s an escalation in the violence, and with the introduction of Rene, the film moves into an area that brings Dead Alive to mind. In fact, Rene’s ultimate demise is so outlandish that you have to laugh. He’s a tough old bastard and he goes out like the crazy coot he is. In addition to Rene’s battle scenes, there are also at least two other moments where characters Greco and Aurore go completely batshit on some zombies, beating them down in extended fight scenes that made me giddy. It was glorious.

Ouessem’s final self-sacrifice so that Aurore and Adewale can escape is absurd and kind of silly, but I’ll be damned if by that point the filmmakers haven’t earned the scene. Ouessem stands on top of a car with literally hundreds of zombies clambering around him, reaching up toward him, shouting and wailing, while he constantly unloads round after round of bullets into the mass. When he runs out of bullets, he breaks out the machete and goes down swinging.

Like I said, it was kind of silly and broke with the realism of the film, but it worked. It was such a striking visual and such a bad-ass character moment that I loved it, laughing and cheering him on.

The final moments with Aurore and Adewale, however, were more serious and bleak. Oddly satisfying, too, in its own way. I mean, what’s a zombie apocalypse without a dark, hopeless ending?

For just wall-to-wall action and hundreds of fast zombies, this one’s hard to beat. It doesn’t break much new ground, but it was a helluva lot of fun to watch.

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