Upon viewing the start of Zombiez I figured I was gonna have to allow a few “gimmes” in watching this for review. From the titles themselves, it looked like the producers went with iMovie to edit this flick. Plus, the opening scene is a man getting chased by sickle and cleaver wielding zombies. These zombies, or Zombiez as it were, hack at the victim with seeming viciousness. During this attack scene, and the following ones, the camera shakily catches the action, not the gore. It looked like the victim was holding stage-blood covered raw chicken. I figured “Okay, NO budget. I can overlook things like that. There’s still a story here.” So, I carried on.

I could go on and on about the details of this movie, but here’s the highlights:
- While being chased by zombiez through the woods, along side a reluctant companion, the lead character, Josephine, is instructed by this companion on how to escape the woods without him. He says “You see those trees over there? You go past those trees and there’s a river. You’ll see a tall mountain, if you cross the river and walk over the mountain, you’ll reach a road where you can flag somebody down.” First off, they’re in the woods, the question “Do you see those trees?” seems redundant, unless you have bad eyes. Second, she’s instructed to simply walk up a “tall mountain”? Well, the mountain turns out to be a rocky ridge, whether it was intended to be an actual mountain or not, I have no idea.
-Once crossing the river, which almost sucks her under, she’s completely dry in the next and subsequent scenes.
-Once reaching this road, she flags down the first car, which crashes into a telephone pole. The front of the car is not shown where it touches the pole, obviously to avoid more expense in the budget. The driver, upon having the door opened, spills out of the car with bloody guts seeping from her stomach (more raw, bloody chicken). Evidently she struck the pole while resting a razor sharp knife set on her lap.
-When one of the zombiez throws a rock at her, she takes on the attitude of “Oh, you wanna play?!” and goes back to the car to make a molotov cocktail out of a bottle of wine. Because, wine is flammable. Once thrown, the zombiez writhe and die in a smoldering plume of smoke. Not even a match in front of the camera or anything, just a shit-ton of smoke.
-After smoking the zombiez to death with a wine molotov cocktail, Josephine climbs down the “mountain”, lands hard and injures herself. She then stumbles over to a tree with a low “V” shape at the bottom, into which she places her ankle and jams it to the other side, as if your ankle pops in and out of a socket. She then makes the weakest splint, two sticks, tied in one spot to her ankle, and hobbles down the road.
-When finally rescuing her boyfriend, the point of all her running beside avoiding zombiez, he is tied to a pole in a room where, 15 feet away, the source of all the zombiez, the Dr., giving a pet talk to his zombie army. Josephine is trying to untie her boyfriend while saying “Shh, shh, we gotta go” over and over, obviously within the peripheral range of the zombiez and the Dr. She then gets him untied, helps him walk over to the door and sits him down right by the door, not around the corner or even through the door, still in the room with the gang of villains and says “Stay here, I’m gonna find way out of here.” What happens? The villains still don’t notice him until he walks right up to them in a stupor calling out for Josephine.

The zombiez were just people with blood on them somewhere that growled a lot. The special effects budget was NIL. Pretty much just chicken and blood. At one point, they use some sausage. There’s even a guy that gets shot twice in the leg. They couldn’t even be bothered to put a spot of blood on his pants as a bullet wound, anything. Nope, just a guy holding his leg and even that didn’t cover up the lack of effects.

The movie opened up with the definition of a zombie in the Haitian sense, not really dead, just drugged into being obedient slaves.There’s also text that pops up before the chapters giving the definition of words like fear, despair and revenge which coincide with what the character is experiencing. It was a nice, stylistic approach, but lost on this tanker of a movie.

Zombiez had a strong opening, but it seems like the producers couldn’t be bothered to put anything in it after that. They seemed to just stop trying. Despite their obvious lack of a budget, a little creativity could have been used to make this film enjoyable, but wasn’t, which made this movie utterly disappointing.

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