Descendents

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 had the pleasure to watch this 'gem' of horror genre in cinema.

The story is about a little girl who gets separated from her mother during a zombie virus outbreak and now has to live on her own, wandering through abandoned, dead villages or suburbs to search for food. Killer-Commandos were sent out to clean up the place, so not to be mistaken for a zombie is high priority on her list.

Because she is immune to the zombie virus, not a single zombie is a threat for this girl. Eventually she finds other kids who are also immune and they group up to find salvation at the ocean - or something.

Sounds awesome? It gets better: Not only the plot is completely destroyed by the main 'characters' being immune to zombies, the visuals are so extremely bad, irritating and unnecessary that you want to break the DVD in half and burn it after wards.

Expect long, pointless slow motion, blurred and shaky scenes even when nothing happens AT ALL. Watching 5 minutes of playing children with an overload of shitty effects and slow motion. GENIUS!

When the little girl remembers her mother, flashback scenes are used. Not one, but you'll see many of them. However, they are all equally annoying and mostly meaningless.

There was hardly any acting or dialog.

Sound effects do their part to slingshot this horror movie right into the dumpster.

This is no trashy-bad zombie movie but simply a VERY bad zombie movie.

1/10

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.

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.

South American cinema at its most powerful. Jose Olguin, director of the fascinating film, Eternal Blood, has left a deep mark upon Chilean cinema and it is clear why his impact has been so profound with this masterpiece. This motion picture certainly is an attempt to reconcile Chile's history of military dictatorships and violation of human rights with the enlightened nation it has become. Beautifully filmed with stylistic cinematic flourish, the imagery is hauntingly stark and surrealistic in intent. Some of what is depicted involving the innocents is shocking but justifiable in light of the artistic purposes of the director. The film is unrated or NC- 17 because of the violence directed at children but these sequences are clearly misinterpreted in their true meaning as metaphor. In the end, Olquin refers stunningly to Magic Realism and the film's conclusion is overwhelmingly mesmerizing. A true treasure of Chile's cinematic legacy.