Brilliant and touching

Better Late Then Never

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

"Apocalisse Zero - Anger of the Dead" and "Age of the Dead" are both the same Uwe Boll production. A virus or youth protesting causes a zombie outbreak. We poorly follow two subplots. One is about Alice who is pregnant and lost her daughter to a zombie snack. She hooks up with Steve and Peter and apparently drive around through Europe for four months as we get a "four months later" tag. Meanwhile another man is experimenting with a woman, possibly a patient zero, and in spite of her importance, she seems to be a sex toy based on the brief scenes of guys straightening out their pants when they leave her. The two subplots come together as we discover the proverbial ferry taking people away to an uninfected island.There are not a lot of characters. The few that exist are boring and don't talk much. We don't get to know these people.Guide: Implied sex, nudity (Désirée Giorgetti)

Anger of the Dead (aka Age of the Dead): This is the full length film inspired by the short but little remains of that apart from the bridge scene. A pregnant woman and two men make there way across the Zombie infested countryside in the hope of reaching a ferry to an island refuge.In a parallel story-line a woman is kept captive and experimented on by a Walking Dead Governor type who hopes to find a cure for his Zombie wife.An adult film with some gruesome scenes, even though the worse is implied rather than shown. 6/10

Anything that even remotely reeks of zombie, pardon the pun, catches my interest. However, unfortunately, the zombie genre is flooded with countless less than mediocre or low budget attempts. "Age of the Dead" (aka "Anger of the Dead") was no exception.This movie is unfathomably slow paced and has very little of any interest to offer a genre drowning in sub par additions. Truth be told, it was a struggle to stick with "Age of the Dead" to the end.The storyline is not particularly appealing and doesn't really throw anything to lure in the audience."Age of the Dead" committed the two atrocities in the genre; fast, agile and running zombies, and the Classic error of doing zombie make-up on the face but forgetting about the rest of the body. And when I first saw a female zombie with fairly impressive zombie make-up on the face, but with smooth, non-decayed skin on the arms and shoulders I was just ready to give up on the movie.The characters in the movie were as about as detailed as a blank sheet of paper. There was no background story, no character development or anything else of any noteworthy thing to make the characters feel real."Age of the Dead" failed to impress or leave a lasting impression in any way that hasn't already been failed in other similar low budget movies, and it is not really a movie that you just got to own in your zombie movie collection. There are so many better zombie movies available.

But was it good? Well, the beginning was good. SPOILERS: The movie starts out with Alice and her daughter at home in their apartment when.......a zombie comes a knockin on the door. This we saw in the trailer.Well, Alice survives and meets another survivor named Stephen. They hook up and have a few friends with them, so it's your basic zombie survival movie. Not everyone makes it. And there's a lot of drama in between. The movie jumps four months ahead to where Alice is pregnant. I actually found that to be the scariest part of the movie because it would be terrifying to be pregnant in a zombie apocalypse with fast moving zombies all over. And I was scared to watch the last twenty minutes because I didn't know what would happen to her. Turns out, how it ended is not what I was expecting at all.There is a dual story here with a woman being experimented on and abused by some soldier guys. I wasn't really happy with that part of the movie, too much violence against women. But her story eventually converges with Alice's story.This kind of movie you will either like it or hate it. I found it suspenseful enough to keep me watching till the end because I didn't know what would happen to Alice and Stephen.It's low budget and there aren't enough main characters. It really needed a few more. And there were times I felt the movie just came to a screeching halt with too much talking and no action, but it has its moments.I have seen a lot worse, I've also seen a lot better. For a low budget, it's average.