Sunday, October 7, 2012


SILVER SCREAMS: ULTIMATE ZOMBIE FEAST DVD REVIEW





Short films are not everyone’s cup of tea (especially mine). Some feel pretentious, pointless and quite frankly, can come across as a waste of time. Short films are however extremely important to the future of the film industry and that is why these aspiring filmmakers who work damned hard deserve the chance to showcase their talents.
The problem with short films is at times they can feel incomplete; due to most having a running time of around five to fifteen minutes. Is it possible to tell a story in less than 900 seconds? Well judging by some of the short films on offer inUltimate Zombie Feast, the answer is most definitely yes!
You’ve guessed it, judging by the name of the feature the short films have a common theme…zombies. There are two discs with over five hours of shorts which equates to sixteen zombie short films from all four corners of the earth to entertain the die hard zombie fan. However there is one key question. Is Ultimate Zombie Feast any good?
The answer – it’s a mixed bag of the bad, the average and very good. The shorts hail mainly from the UK, USA, mainland Europe and one from India called Savages.
Savages deserves a mention as it is one of India’s first independent zombie films. The story focuses on a group of teens who decide to go on a trek in the jungle but of course they get a hell of a lot more than what they bargained for. Considering India is not a nation known for horror movies, let alone shorts, Savages is decent and is fairly good fun and is worth a watch with an open mind.
There are other shorts that have fleeting good moments against a backdrop of low production values including the tongue-in-cheek The Book of Zombie about flesh eating Mormons and Zomblies which ends up being thoroughly entertaining.
Ultimate Zombie Feast is not without little gems that really need to be viewed. These are the films that make shorts worth watching. Kidz is about a group of children who have to find ways of staying alive when their parents are killed during yet another zombie apocalypse. In a word – genius.
Not Even Death is a character led short where David keeps his infected wife chained in his basement, convinced that somewhere hidden within this monster are tiny fragments of humanity. Good performances with touching moments of love and compassion bring a new angle to the zombie genre.
From Denmark is the brilliant mix of puppetry and animation set against the backdrop of the Wild West. It Came From the West comes complete with references to great actors and directors from the western genre, culminates in an hilarious 16 minutes of puppet gore, humour and ‘horror’.
Dead Hungry is the comical short told from a zombie’s point of view. Hungry and looking for brains, Jed can’t catch a break. He falls in love but she loses her head.  Jed discovers life and death is rightly compared to a female dog.
Then there is Bitten which is probably the best short on the disc. It is about a woman who has been bitten then faces up to her horrifying transformation into a zombie. Desperately trying to grasp on to her diminishing humanity she is faced with the horror of what happened to her family. Quite simply this is 6 minutes of brilliant filmmaking with an incredible performance from Claire Wilson.
If blood, guts and decapitations is your thing then look no further than Ultimate Zombie Feast, however be warned, as these are two discs of short films that are well and truly hit and miss.




~fmvmagazine.com

No comments:

Post a Comment