by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Nov 2010
Ground Zero, directed by Channing Lowe of Salt Lake Community College, is a watchable zombie film. This makes it a pleasant oddity. The production values and acting are good and the story did not pop me into disbelief too often.
Ground Zero is a zombie movie that neatly avoids a lot of zombie movie cliches -- there are no zombie hordes, no chase scene, no lots of gunplay as zombie hordes are mowed down -- all those things that make for a ho-hum zombie movie. It gets around these by showing the story of the first zombie, so it's a small and contained story, and it works well.
The production values are good. It's not shaky camera pseudo-documentary style. The camera is steady and the editing is not full of spurious cuts, so it's easy to see what's happening. And the blood spattering and creepy zombies look really blood-spattered and creepy!
The weakest part was, as I so often find in movies, the story. Here are the story inconsistencies I noted:
o At the beginning of the movie the news of the lab break-in is reported on the evening news. In spite of this the shadowy government agents are going to "keep this quiet" by murdering many people around the incident. That won't keep much quiet for long in the US. Better to kill people before the news breaks so the news people won't have anything to cover.
o Darius, the valiant young student who injects himself to make a vivid protest demonstration at the beginning of the movie is an interesting possibility... but if he has no idea what the injection is going to do, he's a valiant wacko comparable to the animal liberation folk who free animals in labs, only more so. One quick way to make him a little less wacko is to make him the son of the top scientist at the lab -- he's protesting his dad's work.
o The thugs that round up the protesters and kill them don't make a lot of sense. At this stage of this protest's evolution this is not going to keep things quiet.
o Jairus and Greer, the main characters, are assigned a clean-up job and told it has to get done fast. On short notice they are given just a few hours to clean up five stiffs. In spite of this tight deadline, and his self-avowed professionalism, Jairus has enough time to philosophize early in the movie, and later in the movie he gets distracted and doesn't "stay on target". I was expecting to hear more, "That's not the issue now. The issue now is getting this job done." from him.
o Cleaning up bullet-riddled stiffs is messy work. The cleaners didn't seem to be dressed appropriately. ...on the other hand, they never got bloody either.
o There were times when the handling of the gun didn't seem right. An automatic pistol puts a new bullet in the chamber each time it is fired -- simply pulling out the clip will leave one shot in the chamber. I never saw Jairus pull the action to pop out that last bullet when he unloaded his gun.
o Jairus's girlfriend on the phone was always so whiney! Yeah, you could be in love with that... but... I wasn't convinced this was anything but a lose-lose relation. I sympathized with Greer on that.
o The mysterious Mr. Johnson showing up at the end of the film solo didn't make sense. He knows there's unexpected trouble. The only way he would show up solo is if he's on a shoestring budget. This is especially so when at the end of the movie he tells Jairus there's really no rush.
So, all-in-all it was a fun movie, and showed a different kind of zombie story. I liked that a lot. I also liked the production values and the acting -- those held me. The story itself had some holes, but no more than average.
On the whole, a worthy watch.
-- The End --