Herd

If you are expecting a Zombie film, you will be sadly mistaken. Why this film is called the "Herd" is beyond me and I truly do not understand why this film is rated so high by IMDb. Some of you will be fooled into watching this film by the trailer or other bias reviews. However, I want to repeat "THIS IS NOT A ZOMBIE FILM"!!!!!!!. I hoped that this film would improve, as I watched it, but it just got worse and was so boring that I just wanted the film to end (so much dialogue that led nowhere and did not enhance the story in anyway).

So, to recap: No Zombies, very little action, the main female character was so annoying that I wanted her to die, no frights, no shocks, absolutely no 'gore', hardly any blood, no scary scenes and NO ZOMBIES!! Waste your money if you want but be prepared to kick yourself for watching such a truly awful film. The title is so misleading, as there is no "HERD"!!!!!

You know when you watch something like Debbie Does Dallas and you can clearly see the so-called actors were plucked out of strip clubs and street corners just by their sheer ineptitude to perform the simple, and I mean simple task of acting convincingly... where you look at some of the directing decisions and thing "Surely I could have done better and I 'm not even a movie director!" ?- well, this movie gets you in that gear right off the bat!

Not only does this movie. Scream low-budget, it also screams "low-talent". The line delivery is high school drama-level. The drama between the two D. I. E characters is so forced and stilted while the chemistry is turned to 0 you just can't help asking "Didn't the director, or caster not see this?".

The thing that happens to one of them on the river is so lame you think, "Dude, you even zoomed-in on the area in question and it is clear that no one could get THAT hurt from that situation".

The whole militia plot I equate to something the director's 10 year old suggested, wrote and co-directed... with veto power on the final product.

I watched this "movie" with my wife and I can absolutely guarantee that any positive review of this trd is very likely paid for or by a member of the cast! Don't waste a fraction of your very valuable time sitting down to watch this. Utter garbage.

Hoping to rebuild their fractured relationship, a woman and her girlfriend head off into the countryside for a weekend retreat, but when they come into contact with a zombie virus that affects one of them must turn to an equally-dangerous militia group for safety against the hordes of undead.

Overall, this was somewhat disappointing if still decent enough effort. The main thing with this one is the rather focused use of the zombies here which is what generates nearly all of the positives here. The backstory for why they're out and about is fine enough for this kind of feature, and when given the behavioral adjustments where they seem fine and not that harmful to others unless they're provoked generates the kind of effective creature here even before getting to their impressive design. The overall look of the creatures with their snarling faces and growing pustules makes for a fun time so that the main attack scenes here are highly effective and enjoyable swarming scenes that are full of solid stunt work where they come after others and generate some grisly effects in the interim. While this is all heavily featured in the first half and last third of the film, that's pretty much the majority of the positives to be had here. There are some issues here that lower this one overall. One of the main drawbacks here is the film's seemingly overwhelming amount of stupidity exhibited by the leads which keep this going along. The whole thing offering of the trip as a means of keeping their relationship intact serves as an excuse to keep the secret about the rapidly-spreading infection from her girlfriend away from others due to some narrow-minded commitment to the relationship instead of thinking about the safety of the group around her for no real reason. This is exacerbated by the wholly uninvolved series of bits beforehand where they seem perfectly aware of everything at the start but their strange fascination with the relationship instead puts them into the fray so that they become infected when around others. This causes a wholly unlikable situation to occur here with the leads being very unlikable and not at all that fun to follow throughout here. The other issue here is the film's wholly reliant ability to utilize some of the most egregious and overdone tropes in the genre as a means of trying to tell a story that isn't all that impressive. The characters being part of the gay community is really the only interesting fact of the film, but it's all wiped away by the increasingly unnatural use of the characters going more for a fear-of-man situation that gets played out quite quickly since it's a feature of every zombie effort. Using the idea of man as the more fearsome enemy in the face of zombies invading is tired, cliched, and really grinds the film to a halt with the use of these features which have very little zombie action in favor of draining dialogue scenes reinforcing these factors. That ends up causing the film to be quite disappointingly absent of zombie features at the expense of irritating characters and genre tropes, so it's got some big factors holding it back.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

With the 2023 movie "Herd" being a zombie movie, of course I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch it. Had I heard about it prior to watching it? No, not even remotely. But with it being a zombie movie, then I am all game, as I have a knack for anything even remotely zombiesque.

The storyline in "Herd", as written by James Allerdyce and Steven Pierce, was rather slow paced and mundane. It wasn't a particularly thrilling or entertaining foray into the zombie genre. The narrative was rather generic and there wasn't really a whole lot happening throughout the course of the 97 minutes that the movie ran for. And that made sitting through "Herd" somewhat of a struggle and an ordeal.

The acting performances in "Herd" were okay, but nothing outstanding, mind you. There were a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, such as Timothy V. Murphy and Corbin Bernsen.

Visually then "Herd" was okay. Again, nothing outstanding, so you're not in for a grand spectacle of zombie effects, blood, guts and mayhem.

"Herd" came and went without leaving a lasting impression. And it is actually not a movie that I would recommend fans of the zombie genre to rush out and get to watch. It is more of a drama than an actual zombie movie, because the zombie outbreak felt like something that only rummaged around in the background, and there were hardly any zombies in the movie.

My rating of director Steven Pierce's 2023 movie "Herd" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

Herd is one movie where you should definitely pay very close attention to the title. Here, the virus is never seen as the real threat, we are.

Synopsis: When Jamie Miller and her wife, Alex Kanai, try to save their failing marriage by going on a canoe trip in rural Missouri, they find themselves stranded after an accident. Alex breaks her leg during a canoe flip and they must slowly make their way to the nearest small town for help. Upon arriving they find it has been overrun by virus-infected "Heps" and extreme right wing local militias who are battling them. The leader of one of the groups, "Big John Gruber", shuttles them to safety at his bunker where they are welcomed by a seemingly friendly group of locals, but after witnessing personal and gruesome horrors, the women know they must escape. Jamie and Alex now find themselves on the run, caught between the group that saved them, a competing militia, and the growing infected Hep threat.