DVD Review: ZOMBIE HUNTER

Review: Zombie Hunter / Cert: TBC / Director: Kevin King / Screenplay: Kevin King, Kurt Knight / Starring: Martin Copping, Danny Trejo, Claire Niederpruem, Jarrod Phillips / Release Date: October 21st

Blood flows and sprays liberally and frequently – and often bright pinkly – in this micro-budget Grindhouse zombie movie which is largely charmless and yet manages to provide mild diversion by virtue of some decent action sequences and impressive, if entirely unexplained, Ray Harryhausen-style monsters which provide a welcome respite from the relentless tide of drooling, slobbering undead.

You surely know the score by now. There’s been a zombie apocalypse, this time courtesy of a street drug called ‘natas’ (this is as subtle as the movie gets) which turns its users – apparently everyone on Earth – into ugly gibbering flesh-eaters. That’s zombies to you. Our hero/narrator is ‘Hunter’, a nameless survivor trundling around in a beaten-up car six months after the outbreak, with just a boot full of booze and bullets for company. Eventually he falls foul of a grubby group of survivors (led by Machete’s Danny Trejo) searching for the sanctuary of a town called Dahmer (which surely rivals ‘natas’ in the subtlety stakes) and together they fend off constant attacks by traditional zombies, raging CGI zombie beast-creatures and, oddly, some bloke with a chainsaw who may or may not be a zombie who seems to have wandered in from a Chainsaw Massacre movie.

Zombie Hunter sure isn’t a good movie but it’s competent enough in its own relentlessly lowbrow way. Copping’s a fairly convincing leading man (although his narration doesn’t make sense by the end of the film) and King’s co-written script gives an enthusiastic cast the chance to run screaming from and/or ingeniously exterminate the zombie horde. But despite the blood which all-too regularly spurts across the camera and the scantily-clad females generally filmed running from behind (if you get our drift), Zombie Hunter just isn’t quite sleazy enough. Regardless of its tiny budget, the film’s almost too well-made when it could have done with a bit more clumsiness and earthy grubbiness to fully satisfy the late night crowd it’s clearly aimed at. We’ve seen worse zombie movies here at Starburst HQ – and God alone knows we’ve seen enough of the damned things – and we can only warn you that if you choose to spend your pennies on this one, you’ll find it’ll provide a few cheap thrills but you’ll have forgotten it by the time the end credits have finished rolling. That’s just the way it is sometimes.

Extras: None