Rating: B
Dir: Howard J. Ford, Jon Ford
Star: Rob Freeman, Prince David Osei, David Dontoh, Ben Crow
I suspect this one must have got lost in the tidal wave of zombie films to be released around the same time. We were probably too busy watching The Walking Dead to notice. It’s a bit of a shame since, largely courtesy of the novel setting, it feels a lot fresher than many from that year, or even 2025. This takes place in Africa, where one of the last flights away from the zombie apocalypse is forced down just off the coast. The few survivors make it to the beach, where USAF Lieutenant Brian Murphy (Freeman) quickly becomes the sole survivor. He manages to find a beat-up but salvageable vehicle, and heads for… An airport, I guess.
Along the way, he teams up with soldier Sergeant Daniel Dembele (Osei). The local agrees to guide Murphy to his destination if he can then use the car to search for his son. Naturally, the increasingly chaotic situation makes a mockery of any plans, and simple survival becomes a full-time occupation. Much the same could, incidentally, be said of the shoot. It took twice the intended six weeks, in part because Freeman ended up in hospital, on an IV drip, after contracting malaria. One of the directors wrote a book on events, which also included “tornados, real-life cannibals and sacrificial killings.” But since the only copy on Amazon is currently, I kid you not, fifteen hundred dollars… I guess I’ll never know the details.
Still, there’s a good deal to appreciate here. Mostly shot in Ghana and Burkina Faso, I’m curious what the locals, with no cultural context in which to put zombies, thought of the whole endeavour. Probably shrugged their shoulders at the weirdness of foreigners, and accepted their dollars. I imagine if you squint hard enough – if you’re one of the people offended by Resident Evil 5, say – you could perceive this as racist from a post-BLM perspective. For, especially before Daniel shows up, you have a white man gunning down hordes of savage, literally inhuman, undead persons of colour. Personally, I never got any further than deciding I would like to see a zombie film where Idris Elba has to fight his way out of Wales.
I particularly liked the effects, in part because this dates from a point where practical work still reigned, rather than relying heavily on mediocre CGI gore. There’s a scene of a zombie getting hit by a car, and their head then gets run over, which provoked a genuine exclamation from me. It also makes good use of extras who are genuinely missing limbs – which, again, is either disgusting exploitation or providing valuable representation for the disabled community. I forget which is supposed to be the case today. Some elements don’t go anywhere: at one point, Murphy comes into possession of a baby, and I thought it was heading into Cargo territory. Instead, he gets rid of it so quickly, they might as well not have bothered. Regardless, it remains a film in need of more recognition than it has received.