Neill Fights The Zombies

(Dream)



NEILL says:

This 2008 production follows the action-horror template familiar from films such as 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead and recent Will Smith turdfest I Am Legend, in that it follows the story of a world ravaged by a virus-based zombie apocalypse, and the efforts of one survivor (in this case 31-year old comics illustrator Neill Cameron) to survive. The story opens with our hero finding himself as the last man in a zombie-overrun New York, and having to fight his way home to his wife and child in East Oxford through endless hordes of the shambling undead.

Utterly derivative in conception, this dream relies upon and indulges in every zombie-movie cliche there is. The plot is largely abandoned for long stretches where Neill simply shoots at zombies and makes their heads explode, a spectacle that offers certain visceral thrills at first but begins to pall after the 1,000th repetition or so. Worse than this, however, are the frequent bizarre lapses in narrative logic. The protagonists tense struggle to survive is suddenly forgotten for an extended sequence where he boards a Concorde flight from New York to London and spends an interminable amount of time deciding what to have from an absurdly opulent onboard buffet. Later in the story events take on an even stranger turn when our hero apparently forgets the zombie threat altogether and spends an inexplicable amount of time running around a London Underground station searching for a place to urinate. And just when this quest is building to a climax, the story ends abruptly, with no sense of closure or completion to events whatsoever.

Sloppy, uninspired and shambolically executed. Still about 70 times better than I Am Legend, though.

5.4/10