Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014)
Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
Barry is a talented mechanic and family man whose life is torn apart on the eve of a zombie apocalypse. His sister, Brooke, is kidnapped by a sinister team of gas-mask wearing soldiers and experimented on by a psychotic doctor. While Brooke plans her escape Barry goes out on the road to find her and teams up with Benny, a fellow survivor – together they must arm themselves and prepare to battle their way through hordes of flesh-eating monsters in a harsh Australian bushland.
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Add in dollops of mordant Aussie humour - keeping zombies on ice in the same place as the beers - and the spirit of Mad Max, The Evil Dead and Peter Jackson's Braindead, and you have a tidy little package of tension, terror and tongue-in-cheek fun.
Zombies, dudes, guns, ostentatious weaponry, booze, and a bitchin' war vehicle straight from the pages of the Mad Max catalogue for the bored and lonely is all genre filmmakers this inventive need.
The model they're hawking is a lively crossbreed of Peter Jackson -style gore comedy of manners (a la "Dead Alive") and "Mad Max" post-apocalypse machine punk, in which brooding antihero Barry (Jay Gallagher), forced to sacrifice his turned wife and daughter, must traverse a zombiefied outback to rescue his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who's been kidnapped by sadistic paramilitaries and subjected to a psycho doctor's evil experiments.
Kiah Roache-Turner’s zombie movie set in the Australian outback displays enough gonzo elements to please genre fans, with its resemblance to the Mad Max series clearly not coincidental.
And why does this whole thing remind me of “Mad Max”?
The pair’s intention to produce a hybrid of Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead results in an enthusiastic and enterprising horror that gleefully spurts fake blood from every available orifice.
There are surface elements in Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead that feel familiar — the “monsters” have a distinct 28 Days Later-vibe to them, the energetic camerawork echoes Dead Alive-era Peter Jackson — and you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking movies about the zombie apocalypse have passed their saturation point, but creativity, talent and personality go a long way towards making the mundane feel fresh and exciting.
The model they're hawking is a lively crossbreed of Peter Jackson -style gore comedy of manners (a la "Dead Alive") and "Mad Max" post-apocalypse machine punk, in which brooding antihero Barry (Jay Gallagher), forced to sacrifice his turned wife and daughter, must traverse a zombiefied outback to rescue his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who's been kidnapped by sadistic paramilitaries and subjected to a psycho doctor's evil experiments.
It's not in the class of Shaun of the Dead but this labour of love (four years in the making for film-maker brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner) is inventive DIY horror that harks back to Ozploitation's golden era.
One could see Roache-Turner having a similar vision that led to “Wyrmwood” after a double feature of “Dawn of the Dead” and “Mad Max”.
Since its premiere at last year’s Fantastic Fest, Wyrmwood has been touted as a mix of The Road Warrior and Dawn of the Dead; the description fits, but frankly, Roache-Turner’s influences expand far and wide beyond the Georges, Miller and Romero.
The pair’s intention to produce a hybrid of Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead results in an enthusiastic and enterprising horror that gleefully spurts fake blood from every available orifice.
Aiding an extremely jovial and pulpy tone are highly detailed transport vehicles (think Mad Max and Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of the Dead), a chained-up Día de los Muertos-lookin’ zombie, and details that build a creative universe worth diving into.
Kiah and Tristan set out to make a film that blends Mad Max and Night Of The Living Dead, and they certainly whip up a rip-roaring mechanized nightmare that screams “Mission Accomplished.”
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Add in dollops of mordant Aussie humour - keeping zombies on ice in the same place as the beers - and the spirit of Mad Max, The Evil Dead and Peter Jackson's Braindead, and you have a tidy little package of tension, terror and tongue-in-cheek fun.
But they eventually make a mistake that's far too common to the modern self-consciously cultish movie by larding the narrative with “mythology” that, in this case, boils down to the same damn pandering Christ metaphor that afflicts every Marvel movie and basically every large-scale American action film after The Matrix.