Enjoy this Monday with Mildred!
This is also Zombie World Tour post!
Evil (To Kako)
I had heard somewhere that the Greeks were pretty good storytellers. Maybe they used to be a few years ago, but I can’t say this lone zombie fest from the cradle of civilization comes anywhere close. Everything is really terrible. Really. Terrible. So bad, actually, that I stopped thinking of it as an attempt at moviemaking and instead watched it as a moronic brother-in-law’s bad joke. I would say lucky for us they never tried it again, but there is apparently a sequel that is fortunately not available on Netflix.
The film is so bad that bashing on it, even in jest, is unsporting and plain mean. So, I will try to resist (not guaranteeing anything just yet) and tell you that it’s the story of what happens when foul mouthed, women hating (as apparently all Greeks are these days) workmen venture into an enormous, uncharted cavern beneath the boringly rendered streets of Athens. There they encounter …something… that does …something… to them, mutating them from regular vacant eyed, mouth breathing, sport junkie misogynists into fast moving and efficient zombies. Luckily, two of them take care to be surrounded by lots of people so they can spread the infection faster.
Everything was badly done. The zombie effects consist of pink contact lens and a fast limp, and the gore seems to be added for by-the-numbers zombie cred. Evil is filmed in early digital at a fairly low resolution (or it’s the worst transfer ever), with no apparent sound equipment or personnel on hand. The story is completely stripped bare of social commentary, though in one actually funny moment we see a man turn zombie on a jumbotron. The acting is wooden and completely unbelievable, the action underwhelming, and the editing is downright ludicrous sometimes.
And yet, I was still interested enough to keep watching past the first ten minutes. The mix of survivors includes a beautiful woman wearing masculine shoes (I think she’s a Lesbian – there were island photos in her apartment), a thoroughly disgusting cab driver (who looks a little like Donny Osmand) who never stops hitting on his fare, a crazy faced guy with a sawed off AK, and the nice young man smart enough to bash brains right off the bat.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to have tried to cover all the correct characteristics of a zombie film without truly understanding their significance, and turned out something really lifeless. (sorry) I would have wanted more coverage of Athens, which might have a few cool settings in it. Instead, we are treated to back alleys and old railroad trestles and underpopulated times of the day, which doesn’t so much give the impression of a city ruined by zombie invasion as it accentuates how cheaply it was made. The casual radio broadcast of available shelters was vaguely reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead, except he could have been reading a laundry list and no one seemed to be listening anyway. And Greek supermarkets are really small. As I mentioned before, the gore is truly substandard. At one point the guy whose innards were just reamed by a dozen passing zombies sits up carefully so the gut harness doesn’t release early. *headdesk*
And yet, I did watch the whole thing. Even through the astoundingly bad fight sequence in the restaurant. There was a funny, though skanky, dream sequence at one point, and a nearly poignant scene at another. I laughed out loud in delight at the skipping zombie. Through it all I felt a vague desire to see what happened to all the characters, so the filmmakers got that right at least.
This is not a good movie, and not quite a So Bad it’s Good film. The only reason I finished was shear curiosity, and then I cursed my curiosity. But now I can say I’ve been to Greece on the Zombie World Tour. Fortunately, I won’t have to go again.
LINKS:
Evil AKA To Kako Trailer (2005) Meletis Georgiadis
Chick Flicking Reviews 