THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Students on a summer break from college are, during their fun vacations are exposed to a "not-so-fun" infectious disease, rapidly spreading and turning those infected into flesh-craving Zombies. When those students return home, the virus spreads even further, enveloping the college and nearby township, spawning a nearly unstoppable herd of ravenous undead. Among the chaos, a campus security guard, obsessed with conspiracy theories, leads a small group of uninfected students and townspeople in a desperate bid to find safety, discover the cause of the Zombie virus and, ultimately, save the world.

MY VERDICT:

Humans versus Zombies is based on the real-life, live action role-playing game that is played in many schools, colleges and universities around the world. Unfortunately, however, this dark comedy is about as intellectually stimulating as the title suggests - it's humans fighting Zombies with the usual dash for barricade-able safehouses and that's it, there simply is nothing of note about this movie to set it apart from the hordes of other Zombie movies out there. Similarly, the jokes are mainly cringe-worthy and not in any way humorous. For example, there is a large section where one of the surviving students plans an assault on the Zombies surrounding their safehouse as an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game with tanking soldiers upfront and spellcasters behind, including a wholly unneeded bit about support characters "throwing out" heal spells. To put the icing on the "don't watch this" cake, the film even steals dialogue from other movies word for word - notably when the security guard leads the initial group off survivors out of the overrun college, starting the entire 'look's clear' scene from Pitch Black. All this negativity just goes to show how ill-thought-out this muddled mess of a picture actually is, one that had a fairly original concept but lacked the creativity to become anything more than "just another Zombie film".