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.

Okay, this is another film that I love and have written about, reworking my original review into a couple of other articles. Our own Corin Totin also gushed about it over in Sick Flix, so I’m not alone in my obsession! Here’s a bit of old news along with some brand-spanking new updated info on the Brothers Roache-Turner!

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is the Australian zombie-action feature film debut from Kiah Roache-Turner and Tristan Roache-Turner. Much like Peter Jackson’s first feature, Bad Taste, it was filmed over four years of weekend shoots. That’s the fucking definition of a labor of love and is a huge part of why I love this film so much. It cost an estimated $160,000 dollars ($37,000 of which was raised via Indiegogo), but may actually have up to a million dollars’ worth of work on the screen thanks to performers and crew deferring payments.

Most of the film was shot relatively close to chronologically, so the film seems a little rough around the edges in the beginning, but by the time the action really gets going there’s a definite uptick in quality that builds to a polished and professional conclusion with everything coming together and firing on all cylinders.

Wyrmwood is a chaotic grindhouse explosion of gore, violence, and jokes that isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you’re a splatter fan with a twisted sense of humor (and don’t take yourself too seriously), you’re probably going to love this. The story is straightforward, but with narrative innovations scattered throughout that present a zombie apocalypse unlike any other.

First up, we’re dealing with the familiar “group of strangers have to come together to survive the zombie apocalypse” topos with a touch of biblical Armageddon for flavoring. We’ve got Benny (Leon Burchill) who opted to shoot the leg off of his zombie brother rather than kill him the morning after a strange meteor shower triggered the zombie apocalypse. He meets up with Barry (Jay Gallagher), a mechanic who had to kill his wife and daughter and is now driven to find his sister, Brooke (Bianca Bradey), an artist who has been captured by what may or not be a mobile government lab run by a mad scientist (Berynn Schwerdt). Along the way, Benny and Barry are joined by Frank (Keith Agius) and together discover that during the day the zombies breathe methane which inspires Barry to rig up a zombie-fueled armored truck that would be right at home in The Road Warrior.

Yes, that’s what I said. Their End-of-the-World vehicle of choice runs on Zombie Breathe. And their blood is flammable, so watch that shit!

The Roache-Turners have come up with a clever way of having both the slow-moving and sprinting zombies that kind of makes sense and follows the internal logic of the film, as well as coming up with a novel concept for the initial spread of infection. What they’ve also done (there’s really a lot going on here!) is craft an origin story for Brooke, who is transformed into a zombie-controlling superhero! And this is really where the film really shines.

Bianca Bradey is a kick-ass zombie fighter who, after being experimented on, gains the power to control the undead. It’s an intense and energetic performance and if you leave the film with nothing else, it will be an obsession with Bradey. She was nominated for a best actress the 2014 Fantastic Fest in Austin Texas and has since been lighting up Australian television in Starting From… Now, and showed up in the horror anthology A Night of Horror Volume 1 (2015). Her next big gig was in Scandinavia’s first superhero movie, Rendel, and is starring in the sci-fi actioner, Violent Starr as the titular female space pirate going up against the legend, Michael Berryman’s huge, evil, godlike head floating in space!

Word on the street is that she will be also be returning to fight zombies in the highly anticipated Wyrmwood: Chronicles of the Dead – a potential 10-part hardcore zombie apocalypse series! The Roache-Turners have just finished shooting a teaser that will be used to shop the show around. To keep up on the latest developments, be sure to follow them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wyrmwoodmovie/! Here’s the teaser, by the way!

While we’re waiting on final word on that, the brothers have started work on their next film project, Nekromancer [EDIT: Now called Nekrotronic!], a “mental ghost” film that promises to be an R-rated Ghostbusters with a touch of Lovecraft and Stephen King. After releasing an awesomely frenetic teaser, they are currently in production with Monica Belucci starring! Here’s that teaser, too!

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