MOVIE REVIEW – Zombie Dawn

Zombie Dawn
Directors: Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas
Writers: Story by Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas and Alex Hurtado, Screenplay by Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas
Producers: Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas
Stars: Cristian Ramos, Guillermo Alfaro, Pablo Tournelle, Pamela Rojas, Felipe Lobos, Christopher Offermann, Maximo Yanez

The old saying is that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun. Zombie Dawn, a micro-budget horror feature imported from Chile and presently hopscotching its way around America in a series of limited engagements, has both a girl and a gun, but I think the more accurate adage for it is that all you need to make a movie is an idea, a camera, and some friends who can work for free.

These days, just about everyone can put their hands on a camera, and most people can come up with a few friendly volunteers. But it’s the idea that’s the nagging thing, and I have seen movies made for many thousands of times the budget of this one that didn’t bother to have an idea.

This is a feature so rife with technical flaws that it will never be mistaken for the work of professionals, or something that cost real money to make. Despite that – and I don’t think it’s my natural predisposition to zombie fare talking although I’ll allow the possibility – this isn’t a movie I can completely dismiss, because you can’t blame a movie for what it isn’t trying to be, and this isn’t trying to be an expensive movie. And filmmakers Cristian Toledo and Lucio A. Rojas, who share seemingly dozens of crew credits on this picture between the two of them, have a genuine idea that, within the means they have, kind of works.

This is not a wall-to-wall feast of zombie splatter – in fact, the undead hordes are off-screen for the majority of the picture. In this way, the film is reminiscent of the unconventional 2010 alien invasion film Monsters (though without the ingenious filmmaking polish that tiny crew managed), in that it is most often a journey through a landscape that contemplates a changed world; a world that has been made uglier, possibly not by the intruders but our own reaction to them.

This time around, the zombies are the product of an undefined mining disaster that led to a messy and ruthless evacuation and quarantine of a large part of the country. Fifteen years after the outbreak, the mining mega-corporation responsible is sending a small squadron of mercenaries in with a handful of scientists on an exploratory mission.

The mission is led by Col. Rainoff (Cristian Ramos), a thoughtful cynic who narrates the film in voice-over. A mercenary who claims to specialize in “cleaning up the assholes of others”, he seems to understand that his own archetype – the grounded paycheck laborer – is one that his bosses have been getting fat off of for generations. His attitude about his lot in life and the role his bosses have played in destroying his country simmers underneath the incidents on-screen, acting as a plot structure of their own.

His mission, once revealed, seems like a most improbable and impractical gamble, until you adjust the equation for how staggeringly cheap are the lives of these soldiers and scientists when set against the possible reward. Behind the quarantine fence they find a few unpleasant surprises, the potential for very evil deeds within themselves, and those imperturbable zombies.

We don’t get any information about how these particular zombies operate, the movie assumes basic knowledge on the part of its audience and dispenses with explanations. The creatures (the crew is small enough that the end credits list every single extra) behave like the inconsistent bastards of zombie master texts like George Romero’s oeuvre, 28 Days/Weeks Later, and the Resident Evil film adaptations. It is not exactly important that they adhere to strict rules in this case, they exist simply as a fact that keeps death hovering just outside the camera frame.

As I have said, you need to grit your way through Zombie Dawn’s technical shortcomings. This is homebrewed digital effects, a non-professional cast, found locations, very few close-ups, and a low-grade camera whose image cannot handle the blow up to big-screen dimensions. Sound leveling is wildly-inconsistent, and scenes set in low light feature so much correction “noise” that they could be put in a textbook as an example of how to know when you’ve done something wrong. The English subtitles (the dialogue is all in Spanish) are so poorly-timed that you can lose track of who is saying what in heated arguments, and occasionally they seem to give up entirely and skip important lines in order to get on to the next scene. You don’t want a movie to have you thinking about how good subtitles are often taken for granted while said movie is still playing.

But, they have cut together what they have pretty cleanly (co-director Toledo was the editor), and I found myself appreciating surprising virtues that can emerge in this context. Their rubble-filled locations have an ironic authority because no artist was around to try and make them attractive. And actors who don’t know how to act also don’t know how to act badly – the default posture for this cast is a kind of wary dullness. If you think about it, that’s rather believable for uneducated soldiers marching through an ugly countryside where nothing happens for days at a time. Ramos’s performance achieves moments of very effective stillness, while Guillermo Alfaro, as Sgt. Mondaca, creates an unexpectedly multi-dimensional character who combines frighteningly-restless aggression with a kind of painful devotion to his squadron-mate Dag (Maximo Yanez).

This is a movie that simply lacks the resources to provide us with the clichés a more expensive bad movie might. Combat is messy and clumsy, fought in inconvenient locations, but part of the nature of a zombie outbreak is its inconvenience. There are no moodily-lit command centers, no fancy lab equipment, no master thespians around to provide exposition. One scene shows a type of assault which has been shown in other films, but either through squeamishness or an unpleasant impulse to increase its impact, is rarely shown straight on. Here, with no equipment or technique available to make it look like anything else, the act takes on a brutal, pitiful banality that instantly sets the warped impulses of the perpetrator in stark and inescapable relief.

Great swaths of the population – people who prefer movies in English, people who have technical standards, people who want their zombie movies to have a lot of action and close-up makeup effects – will have good reason not to want to give 80 minutes of their lives to Zombie Dawn. I’m not going to try to argue them out of that position. But I am glad that I saw it, because whatever else I can say about the filmmakers, I think they had more than a girl and a gun. They had an idea. And if I learned they were making another film, I’d be interested to know what it was about.

P.S. I don’t know if this will be true for all engagements, but our showing not only included a free mini-comic book, which serves as a quasi prologue to the feature, it also included a short cartoon called Hambuster – a gleefully-gruesome digitally-animated nightmare prank that shows fast food turning the tables on its consumers. The cartoon, ragged in look but audacious in its humor and gore, can be viewed in its entirety here.