Alice doesn’t live here anymore. Why? She’s on the run from a spreading zombie contagion in Anger of the Dead AKA Age of the Dead (both irredeemably stupid titles).
Alice (Robert Sparta), in addition to being pregnant, is burdened with asthma and resorting to defending herself with a knitting needle from the rampaging undead. Luckily, she’s helped out by a Good Samaritan who runs over one the zombies and endeavors to drive her to that zombie film MacGuffin staple, the safe haven.
Meanwhile, a mysterious strapped-down female prisoner has escaped a dark room. We know this because of her captors’ extended forest exposition looking for her, while arguing among themselves and offering Yoda-like homilies like, “words are used by everyone, wisdom by few.”
Anger of the Dead’s concurrent twin-chase plot device makes it slightly different from other zombie flicks and talkathons like The Walking Dead.
We soon discover zombies follow their prey by sonar, “wandering vainly and destroying everything that comes across their path.”
Our heroes use police shortwave to assist their mission, trying to get to a port and an island escape so Alice can comfortably give birth away from the rampaging hordes.
Some bumpy conveyor belt dialogue in the mouths of an otherwise game, predominantly Italian cast. Jon Hamm double Aaron Stielstra is fun as the Machiavellian alpha goon Rooker. He’s a spaghetti Western figure whose henchmen (at least the ones who don’t cross him) take refuge in…well, The Refuge.
Anger of the Dead is co-produced by the notorious Uwe Boll, the German maverick who recently went on a YouTube rant decrying crowd funding’s “retarded amateur idiots,” after failing to adequately fund his last project. We’re not going to cheap shot him here; for all his faults as a filmmaker, the man’s got titanium balls
Regardless, he’s relegated to background here; Director Francesco Picone adapted Anger from his own 2013 short.
Like Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City, Anger of the Dead features zombies only made up from the neck up. It also has the modern conceit of sped-up creatures.
What isn’t sped up though, is the narrative, which some have complained, lags in parts.
Not nearly as bad as its IMDb reviews would have you believe, but it’s also not particularly brain-blowing.
*** (out of 5)
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