Descendents

"Everyone lost hope and their worst fears became reality." In the future a strange virus takes hold of the world turning everyone into zombies. While the world is being overrun a few children are born immune to the disease. One little girl begins a trip to the ocean where she thinks she will find safety. She meets a few more children like her and together the must avoid the zombies as well as the military to get to their goal. I have to admit that based on the cover and the preview I was expecting lameness. While I can't say this is a great movie it was much better then I expected. I do however think the pitch meeting went like this : So you want to make a zombie movie with very little talking, or plot. Just a little girl walking and watching people get eaten until she finds water. Is that right? Yes that is correct. OK, here is 5 million dollars...have fun. I am not a fan of zombie movies but this one was watchable and much better then I was expecting. The end is bizarre and is worth watching just for that though. Overall, much better then expected and fans of zombie movies will probably like this a lot. I say C+.

Beyond Geroge Romero there has not been a zombie film that's loaded with this much social/political commentary. Jorge Olguin's 2002 follow-up to SANGRE ETERNA aka ETERNAL BLOOD is a very strong and original post-apocalyptic/Sci-fi/horror movie. For about a half a million dollars, the movie was shot in ten days, with mostly young children ranging from five to ten years old. The children's acting may not be up to par and some of the effects surely reflect the lack of budget & time but DESCENDENTS/SOLOS is a truly dark and disturbing movie set in a dystopian world that looks like a low budget mixture of 28 DAYS LATER and CHILDREN OF MEN, with strong echoes to Chile's past as a military dictatorship. Jorge Olguin is a talent to definitely keep an eye on.

DESCENDENTS is a cheap Chilean post-apocalypse movie in which the central character is a bland little girl who wanders around having lost her parents. The film was apparently shot on the ultra-cheap and in just ten days, which gives some indication as to the reasons why it feels so rushed and amateurish.

I don't mind cheap films if they have good stories, because after all good stories cost nothing. However, this one doesn't. The main character is dull beyond belief and attempts to turn this into a zombie movie fall flat time and time again with ridiculous overacting extras. To disguise the paucity of his film, the director includes lots of camera effects, alongside filters, flashbacks, and plenty more in an attempt to distract the viewer, but needless to say I saw straight through all that. In the end, DESCENDENTS has nothing to say of any note.

Jore Olguin, visionary director and auteur, has taken a quite minimal budget and fashioned a masterpiece from it. With haunting imagery and surrealistic cinematographic effects, Olguin's saga of children surviving a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by zombies and killer soldiers unlike anything filmed before. The zombie genre has been overused and is a tired but this is a return to Romero's original concept and it is a stunning accomplishment. The unrelenting horror can sometimes be overwhelming and while it may be necessary to turn away and regain one's composure, this is ultimate a very satisfactory film experience indeed. The Chilean locations heightens the feeling of other worldliness and the sense of an out-of- kilter existence beautifully. An artistic metaphor for how humanity collectively fears the outsider, this is an important and memorable film.

I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic/zombie films so I figured this would be right up my alley. I may have misjudged...

So the film is basically an hour and thirteen minutes of watching a young girl walk through various desolate scenes devoid of any emotion. I can't say she's a bad actor because really at no point does she need to act. As long as she kept walking, the crew kept filming.

It's visually very boring on the eyes. They tried this Schindler's List/Sin City effect where mostly ever shot has a low saturation making it nearly black and white EXCEPT for blood which is vividly bright red. And it would "splatter" on the camera in every action scene much like a video game from 10 years ago. For some reason, I'm now craving cherry Kool-Aid.

The film is riddled with flashbacks that you're forced to witness multiple times for lengthy durations, while not really contributing to any story or character development. It's not very endearing...

The blood and zombie special effects were tolerable but as you'll learn, the zombies are no threat to the main character therefore there is no real terror as a viewer either. I watched this by myself in the dark with headphones on and never once was frightened to any degree.

I must say that the opening sequence was the best part of the film. It was creative and had a unique charm to it. As sudden as it came, the charm was gone. On the flip side, the ending credits were pretty cool too.

Overall, this really isn't worth your time but it is a relatively short film so be my guest. Just remember that you have been warned. If you do have the patience to get through the entire movie, I must inform you that there is one last scene after the credits, which unsuccessfully tries to give you the back story of how the world came to be. Enjoy! -- 4/10 --