Contains mild
spoilers.
After the warm and
fuzzy Warm Bodies and rather timid by today's standard The Plague of the Zombies I felt the need for something, as they say in the film, a bit more
hardcore.
La Horde or The
Horde as it was called for a US audience that probably got confused, is an
unreserved comic book action film with zombies. In a good making of documentary
extra, French directors and writers Benjamin Rocher and Yannick Dahan were
unabashed in their aims, declaring they wanted foremost to make an action film
from the 80s that was over the top, excessive and foremost very European
centric. Whilst they loved zombies they cared little of established genre
traditions, especially the US Romero flavour, they would make the zombies work
for the action and not vice versa. I'm in the camp that says genre conventions
are there to be broken or else there is the danger it would all become stale
and look forward to seeing new things being tried, and in all honesty having
now watched some of the most visceral, brutal zombie scenes I've yet seen, I
really don't think they don't care about
zombies.
La Horde doesn't
waste time. Four Parisian police offers covertly infiltrate a dilapidated, high
rise on the outskirts of town to take revenge on a crime boss who has killed
one of their own. They get it hopelessly wrong, get captured and then without
warning the end of the world falls down on all of them a like a proverbial ton of
shit-bricks. It's visceral, impactful, shocking and sudden. One second they're
at odds, police vs gangsters, and I'd even had to quickly check the box to see
that I'd got the right film, that it wasn't an action cop film, the next the
world is literally trying to break their door down and brutally slaughter and
eat them.
The zombies in La
Horde are mean, nasty, gnarly bad-asses with teeth like piranhas. They're as
quick as those in Boyles' 28 Days Later but stronger and more vicious, sadistic
and unrelenting and whilst I'm used to the-shooting-them-in-the-body-has-no-effect
- got-to-shoot-them-in-the-head trope I've never seen it played out quite so
extremely. Rocher and Dahan weren't kidding when they said they wanted over the
top comic book action, and from their first appearance every encounter is
frantic, on the edge, visceral and very, very bloody. With frenetic camera work
with shake, speed-ups, breaks and strobe effects the feeling of panic and
desperation is pervasive and adds to the brilliantly to an unremitting pace. It
reminded me a lot of Rec which came out while they were shooting.
For all the blood,
gore and genuine attention at making up the zombies to look as evil and
dangerous as possible, the comic book over-tone somehow makes the film not actually that scary. The over the top
fight scenes and heavy reliance on hand to hand combat, with excessive use of
head butts, speeded up and repetitious hit-sequences give it all an almost
surreal, comical feel. You know those sequences in tom and jerry when jerry
would hit tom with a frying pan over and over in a loop; they're like that. The
film really is also, when all said and done, just a sequence of these scenes
too, with the time spent in between just short breathers before moving us
quickly onto the next. It's all highly stylised with original touches of
flourish, and immaculately shot but it's all a little shallow and you wonder
whether they should have been a little more ambitious.
A tight,
claustrophobic high intensity action zombie film La Horde is a relentless
assault of the senses. As bloody and gory as anything else out there its comic
book feel dampens the scares to leave more of a smile on your face than a
feeling of discomfort. With some ludicrous over the top scenes and an audacious
finale it's certainly very enjoyable though-out with much memorable characters and
dialogue. La Horde is a recommended bloody roller-coaster ride that taught me
two things. One, that whilst I entertain a longing for the zombie apocalypse,
in reality it probably wouldn't be very nice and two, never fuck with a
Nigerian, 7/10.
Great movie. It's all been done before, but this movie does it with a certain anger and panache that make it all its own.
ReplyDeleteIt is great fun and I think you summed it up well. Another international flick, not appeared over here yet but definitely on my radar is the Russian flick Winter of the Dead: http://youtu.be/KqsktQomkB0
ReplyDelete