Zombies are everywhere these days. It’s hard to imagine but there was a time when zombie movies were seriously niche territory that appealed only to hardcore horror nerds. Ten years ago even, George A. Romero’s masterful Dead Trilogy were considered fairly obscure to casual film fans. Now with Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland showing their funny side, The Walking Dead one of the most popular shows on TV and the upcoming mega-budget World War Z starring king-of-the-A-list Brad Pitt, the moaning weirdoes are shambling all over the mainstream.
With all this zombie madness any low-budget zombie flick hoping to make any kind of impact has to have a unique approach or at least some new ideas. Extinction has neither; it’s portrayal of a world overtaken by the undead is nothing anyone even vaguely familiar with zombie flicks won’t have seen many, many times before.
Although it’s a German film set in Germany, Extinction’s makers are clearly hoping to reach as wide an audience as possible by having all its characters speak English, despite some of the actors clearly not being entirely au fait with the language. This gives the film a slightly surreal quality as its characters are all stereotypical American survival-horror’ types (mysterious loner, grizzled old-timer, plucky nurse, paranoid scientist etc) and reel off the kind of clichéd gung-ho dialogue found in American B-movies, except in German accents and often with weird, stilted pronunciation.
It’s a standard apocalyptic plot that sees the cast (led by Daniel Buder as the previously mentioned mysterious loner) hiding out in an abandoned military base when the local population inexplicably turn into flesh-hungry ghouls. It feels like director Niki Drozdowski and co-writer Ralf Betz sat down and watched every zombie film ever made from Romero’s trilogy to 28 Days Later to TV’s The Walking Dead but instead of taking inspiration to come up with their own story, they just decided to shamelessly replicate these other, better stories. Almost every scene has been done before and done better. Extinction is a film that revels in its unoriginality, as if it’s actively afraid to try anything new for fear of upsetting fans of the films it’s ripping off.
Drozdowski makes use of the Red One camera that allows some atmospheric photography despite the limited budget. Unfortunately the action scenes feel overly staged and rely on shaky camera work to create a sense of jeopardy. There are some pretty good practical gore effects, but when the biggest compliment you can pay a horror film is to say that the blood looks nice, you know it isn’t very effective.
The film that most puts Extinction to shame is Jim Mickle’s Stake Land, which was put together on a similarly tight budget and shot on the Red One camera. But it also had imagination, characters with some degree of depth and, crucially, ideas of its own. These are all things Extinction needed to prevent it being the boring, predictable mess that it is.
Overall Verdict: A bland, by-the-numbers zombie film with a complete lack of original ideas. Shoot it in the head.
Special Features:
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Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon