ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction (2009)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) I’ve seen enough low-budget zombie movies by now to have clear expectations: most of them are terrible. They’re often at the lowest degree of filmmaking, in which filmmakers who love horror more than movies get together with friends and a few gallons of red syrup in a small country house and patch up something like a film, confident that their gore effects and the mere word “zombie” in their title will be enough to satisfy audiences. My expectations upon any new zombie film are thus accordingly low. Fortunately, ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction exceeded them. Director Kevin Hamedani does quite a few things right — starting with putting the film’s human characters at the forefront rather than fetishizing its monsters. Explicitly set in 2003 against a backdrop of small-town anti-terrorist hysteria, the film adopts a satirical approach that’s sometimes overdone but otherwise refreshing. It’s also surprisingly engaged for a zombie film — featuring protagonists that are of Iranian ethnicity, homosexual orientation or progressive politics and confronting them with both the undead and reactionary politics. The film’s production values are improved by seemingly having taken over the real-life picturesque town of Port Gamble, lending an unusual amount of geographical cohesion to the result. I’m not saying that the result is particularly good — there are plenty of areas where the script could have been improved (such as the “interrogating a presumed terrorist” bit that’s funny the first time or two, but quickly loses its lustre afterward) or the tone sharpened to something less dated, but ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction is already a cut above most other zombie movies of its class, so that’s not too bad.