It's no secret that horror and exploitation movies lend themselves to low budgets and over the years, we've seen many. Going back to the B-movie and the move from that into horror, particularly the early days of VHS, there has been no end of low-budget horrors. The good thing about horror is that you don't need vast sums of money to scare someone. Once I hid in the back of my girlfriend's car late at night and when she got in (to come pick me up from a nearby pub as it happened), I pounced... the scream she let out was amazing! That was a scare for free. But I digress...
Back in the days of video nasties there were plenty of low-budget efforts, but they had that awful picture quality to hide their sins. Nowadays with such sharp picture quality on every TV, your film has to be so much better visually. And that said, the effects in this film are for the most part pretty impressive. It's nice to see almost all of them done in the proper way and not digitally, at least. The makeup effects in particular were well done and praiseworthy.
With regards to the plot, they've tried to do three brave things: 1) They've provided an interesting storyline. A lot of low budget films don't bother and it is mentioned in the extras that the storyline came first and set pieces second.
2) The film is set against a historical background. This opens up opportunities for inaccuracy and of course the bother of more complex sets and outfits. However, going on the 'making of' they were clearly aware of this and planned to use it to their advantage (not worrying too much about the historical accuracy side of things).
3) They've messed with convention and have zombies which can revert back to the living.
On the first two points, to some extent they've successfully achieved their goals. On the third point, I have to confess that I'm old school, so I can't really say I liked this aspect of the film, although for the purposes of the storyline I can see why this might've been useful.
The acting ranges from below adequate to very good (particularly Matt Neal, who put in a decent performance). As one reviewer on Amazon noted, it even varies fairly substantially for individual actors from one scene to another, which personally I found a little distracting. But they throw themselves into it with gusto and generally speaking, they do a decent enough job. The audio was excellent and a reminder how lucky we are in this age of films, as so many people can put together a decent score. That said, I'm making the assumption it has been made solely for this film... I couldn't find anything out about it. So I could be wrong on that one! In terms of the film more broadly, I found that at times I was really enjoying it, but other times my mind started to wander. That's not so much due to the pacing or the storyline, but more to do with the hit and miss nature of the scenes and for some reason, the lighting and framing of the shots in certain scenes. Also the nature of flashbacks in a film like this does remove some tension, as you can kind of guess who is going to buy it and who doesn't (or can you!).
My worst criticism would be that at the end, the film just stops. I think the ending would've been absolutely fine, but it really needed to build to that moment (particularly the music) before cutting to credits. As it stands, most people will probably be a bit surprised. That said, overall it's a pretty good effort and I could see some of those involved going on to do more films in future. And although I don't know the exact budget, I doubt it was all that high, so on that basis it's an excellent effort. They've chosen the tougher options and gone all out to make something a bit more interesting, so fair play to them. If you can watch and enjoy a film for what it is without being overly critical, then I'm sure there's plenty for you to enjoy here. 5/10.
