Extinction: The G.M.O Chronicles Review

Extinction: The G.M.O Chronicles

Year: 2011

Stars: Daniel Buder, Luise Bähr and Jerry Coyle

Directed: Niki Drozdowski

Running Time: 115mins approx.

 

This is a European offering into the ever increasing giant pit that is zombie genre market that we the living folks seem to eat up.

Oh yes we do love an apocalyptic film grounded in the zombie universe. This one is by director Niki Drozdowski and for me I have to say a reasonably enjoyable trip to zombie town this time round.

So we start off with a lone survivor of a lovely viral Z Apoc one of my favourite ways to start an undead army!

This guy (played by Daniel Buder a small time German TV series/TV Movie actor nothing of which I could tell you about that you’d recognise) is making a video log on a laptop chronicling his situation. Quite rightly he’s pissed off lonely and thinks he’s the last human being left alive, we see him about to blow his brain out when the scene cuts to 3 days before this.

He’s driving back to his home when strange things start happening around him people running from others or being attacked, this he doesn’t initially notice.

He runs over a person and gets out seeing what he’s done, to find he’s smashed into a zombie looking perplexed at the corpse it suddenly spins around at him. Now I’m not sure on the budget of this film but I’m guessing it wasn’t amazing. I’ve seen some small budget films do VERY BAD effects from just some make up like green tinting skin and some black around the eyes.

I’m talking about recent zombie/horror films as well not oldies. This film has some pretty decent make up effects they look decaying and infected and dead very effective this for a small budget is done so well so commendation points there.

Anyway a bit ensues and we join him back in *present day* at the laptop saying he couldn’t kill himself, though he will keep one bullet on the night stand if he ever feel he wants to for real.

These zombies hibernate at night for some reason, it is explained in the film but I won’t spoil it

So choosing to go foraging for food at night time he does come across some new survivors who join him at a disused military base he’s holed himself up in.

He finds and loses a few more people along the way due to deaths etc.

Over all apart from some dodgy line delivery and I mean even though the majority of the cast is German or other European nationalities and the script is so obviously written by a non-English speaker. The one actual British speaking guy (an American) has one of the worst line deliveries of the film.

Sure the other cast members don’t deliver perfect but I’m almost 100% sure you can put that down to English not being their primary language. This can lead to some situations not being put across properly due to the actors not knowing how to react to the words as their concentrating on their pronunciation I would say this for me is worst part of the film.

 

One more bad part would be the power plant explosion where some debris get strewn about but nothing on the scale you'd think and the nice cars aren't damage as the budget wouldn't allow it.

Packed full of clichés to the rafters, secrets love triangles awkwardness and more just adds to the cheesy likability of this film. One thing I’ll say in its defence is they really tried to make a decent movie with some good ideas there with this one.

A suitable ending to zombie film of this type that I won’t spoil *cough* Mutant *Cough* either I actually really enjoyed this, that made a nice change from the usual in this genre so I will say give it a go if you’re a fan of zombie films which I am you’ll probably find you haven’t wasted your time.

If you aren’t a fan?

Well try it you might just find you like it anyway. I definitely think it’s worth a watch and adding to the reasonably good zombie movie pile when compared to some of nonsense drivel that’s out there at the moment.