After enjoying this year's Daybreakers, which to my surprise was a surprisingly mature and well made vampire picture, I decided to seek out Australian directors Peter and Michael Spierig’s previous film, their 2003 debut Undead. The film tells the story of a space-borne zombie plague ravaging the Aussie town of Berkeley and the handful of survivors who band together to try and make it out alive. Clocking in at 104 minutes, the film moves by at a fair clip and will satisfy die-hard fans of the zombie genre but will leave everyone else cold. The enthusiasm of first-time directors the Spierig Brothers is unmistakable but everything else misfires in a big way.
Upon its release the film failed to garner an audience, couldn’t recoup more than a fraction of its modest $1,000,000 budget, and scored a Seagal-worthy 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Spierig Brothers were so dispirited that they took their ball and went home, not producing any further work until Daybreakers six years later. While the brothers’ enthusiasm is evident in the madcap pace, handfuls of everything that happens onscreen, the acting, writing, and music conspire against them and in the end you’re left with a baffling, irritating, and unrewarding experience.
As the film begins we see Berkeley beauty queen Rene narrowly escaping attack at the hands of the shambling horde after a series of meteors slam to earth, presumably spreading the zombie virus. She finds refuge in the home of Marion who, we’re supposed to believe, once owned a weapons store but, after being attacked by a zombie fish, walks around firing three shotguns strapped together on a metal frame and building bomb shelters in his basement. Really. Soon these two are joined by others whose names are as forgettable as their characters and through their own stupidity are forced to leave the stronghold of Marion’s home to attempt to escape from the city.
After a while I found myself wondering if the Spierig Brothers were both hard of hearing and so, by constantly urging their cast to “speak up”, ended up with every character shouting at the top of their voice as though they were trying to order drinks in a wind tunnel. This ear-splitting volume is used in place of tension, everyone shrieking at the top of their voice and emoting hard enough to give the audience haemorrhoids. I’m not exaggerating when I say that there were times when the amount of noise generated onscreen by human beings alone became unbearable.
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