WOW. Here we have something special.
Ok, wait, let me qualify that.
For starters, let me say: my first impression was, most people will hate this movie. Reading up on it afterwards, as is my habit when a movie really interests me, I discovered, yes, sure, enough, everybody hated it. Not just disliked it, I mean REALLY hated it.
I was blown away by it, loved almost every minute of it.
This is a very flawed and totally amateurish movie for sure—but, here’s the rub: “Night Of The Living Dead”, “Eraserhead”, and most of David Cronenberg’s classic films were flawed, very amateurish movies. Like them, this to me is the work of an extremely skilled amateur savant, someone with absolutely no understanding of most of the conventions of storytelling, and an absolutely brilliant intuitive feel for the camera and the editing desk.
This is a movie for deep, deep horror aficianados. It is absolutely gory, grand guignol. It has very little plot and so little dialogue it could pass for a silent movie. It’s almost an art film. None of the characters even have names. It looks like it was filmed on a $1.50 budget.
The plot is almost nonexistent: A heroin-addicted serial killer roams the city streets while some sort of zombie apocalypse rages. And that’s it. Beyond episodic scenes of people trying to survive and the title “necropath” walking around trying to fulfill whichever hunger of his is dominant in the moment, what little plot there is left open-ended. No questions are answered. Is the serial killer a zombie? Are the “zombies” alive or dead (they seem to be able to think and have an odd tendency to speak, as much as anybody in this movie does, which pretty much amounts mostly to one-word utterances.) None of it is ever explained. And if you ask me, it doesn’t matter.
The movie is absolutely carried by the performance of the killer, whose gibbering, bug-eyed, feral performance alone eleviates this to the level of a favorite for me. From the very first sight of him, leering eerily out-of-focus outside a car window as he prepares to attack the occupant, I was immediately gripped. The performance, the cinematography, everything… that one shot was enough to tell me something was special here.
This reminded me in a way of “The Inside” (2012), another movie that forgoes pretty much all the conventions of movie making such as, say, plot—ordinarily something I prefer a movie has—very successfully, in my opinion. This, like “The Inside”, is not a movie about a story, it’s a movie about the conventions of the horror genre, and it tackles hallowed conventions in a fresh way. This one was even better at it than “The Inside”, too, and despite the conventional (read: tired) zombie film tropes, this one is far more original in how it tackles it.
I don’t know if anyone in the world but me likes this movie, or even doesn’t absolutely hate it. But I loved it. Absolutely should be a deep cult favorite. I am sure as years go by horror aficianados here and there will talk about this with reverence. And most (of the very few) people who’ve seen it will think they’re nuts. But they’re not. It’s repellent and awful and disgusting and horribly lacking in any conventional redeeming qualities, and also, really, really something special for the kind of audience that can appreciate it.
Think of it as a zombie movie “Last Exit To Brooklyn”, if that helps put it in perspective.