REMAINS
DVD. Metrodome.

With 30 Days of Night, Steve Niles managed to reinvent the vampire as a feral, animalistic and terrifying creature, helping reclaim the undead from the sparkly, touchy-feely world of Twilight, Anne Rice etc. So you might hope that he would be the man able to inject new life into the zombie apocalypse film. But if we are to assume that the film version of his comic book series Remains is a reasonably faithful interpretation of the story, then it seems that this really is the most static of genres.

Coming in the wake of The Walking Dead, this is another comic-to-TV transition, in this case a low budget movie for Chiller TV, and taken on its own merits, it’s not that bad. It just has nothing new to say. After a new device designed to render the world’s nuclear weapons harmless, a handful of survivors in Reno barricade themselves inside a casino, with no real plan of what to do next. Help seems to come in the form of a travelling band of paramilitaries, but they soon turn out to be only interested in their own survival, leaving the casino inhabitants to figure out their own plans for escape, while bickering constantly.

All this will seem very familiar to any seasoned (or even casual) zombie film viewer. The locations may vary, but it’s otherwise the same old story, with bits seemingly cribbed from every zombie hit of the last 40 years. Writer John Doolan and director Colin Theys can’t seem to decide on a style for the film, which jumps from grim horror to ill-placed humour that the cast are really not up to making work, and the story feels very episodic – I assume that all five issues of the comic have been squeezed into this story. As for the zombies – they look far too scarred with inflexible makeup – a possible result of the low-budget film trying a bit too hard to look expensive. Alongside a truly laughable CGI car crash, these effects hamper the film somewhat, which is a pity because a lot of the gore is well handled. Interestingly, no one seems to have been able to decide if these were fast or slow zombies, and so they tend to be both, the choice depended on what works best for the specific scene.

There are some interesting slants: here, the zombies (and we don’t know if they are actually dead or not) are driven by an insatiable hunger – not simply for human flesh, but for anything – dead animals, garbage, each other, even their own bodies. And they still need sleep (while standing – one of the more effectively creepy moments of the film) and have bodily functions, so we’re told.
But these small touches can’t disguise the fact that this is a story that has been done to death, and that’s really what does for Remains in the end. Not that it’s a bad film – it isn’t – but simply that it is one of a seemingly endless variations on the same story. And while light-years ahead of the worst examples of the genre (no genre has attracted more awful filmmakers than the zombie movie – not even porn), it still pales in comparison with the best.

DAVID FLINT

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