As it's coming up to October and Halloween, alot of horror films get released. One of them is French Zombie film La Horde, a film that equally packs action, suspense and bloody horror into a run time of 92 minutes. What did i think of La Horde?
Ah....the Zombie, the living dead, the flesh eaters. I love a good Zombie film, i don't know what attracts me more to the zombie genre more than say vampires or werewolves, it could be that most zombie films rely on isolation as a theme or what you would do in a situation where the dead had returned to life, or could even be that the science behind zombification seems more plausible than vampirism or becoming a werewolf. Either way, they are the more intriguing of the horror monsters. |The First proper zombie film i ever saw was George A Romero's Dawn Of The Dead and that opened my eyes to a world of living dead flicks. Films such as Lucio Fulci's Zombie and Stuart Gordon's Re-animator, i also discovered that a lot of amateur film makers were trying their hands at this sub genre of horror. Small Indie pics like Zombies of Mass Destruction, Dead Air and Automaton Transfusion, These films were made on a miniature budget compared to the likes of the Dawn Of The Dead Remake and to an extent 28 Days Later. after the Later film and the introduction of the running 'zombie', the genre became more popular and not only in the U.K and America, Europe were also joining the zombie band wagon. The Dutch film, Dead Snow is one example, another is the Spanish film [REC]*. In recent years, the French have upped the stakes in the gore film ledger, with films like Switch-blade Romance and Martyrs, and now they've joined the ranks of the zombie elite. In the last year we've not only had one film but two, Mutants and La Horde. It's the Latter that I am about to review.
La Horde is the kind of film we've seen a million times, well zombie film that is. The plot is quite familiar but i'll get into that in a moment. Like i stated in my opening paragraph, the french seem to be the ones to turn to for gore films these days because with the MPAA and the BBFC, everything seems as though it should be toned down and with recent cuts to A Serbian Film and I Spit on Your Grave Remake, it looks as though the U.K is heading for another Video Nasties problem. The strange thing about the amount of violence we see on our screens here in the U.K is that unlike the U.S we do not have an option of releasing a film unrated. When you look at the British film Eden Lake, a film that is sadistically violent with it's violence aimed at a woman and her husband., the film gets passed uncut. Eden Lake is in the same Vein as Straw Dogs only minus the rape, but it's still a shocking piece of cinema, then you look at a film like Kick Ass which i believe should have been rated an 18 and not a 15, if the BBFC are going to do that, then they might as well rate it a 12A. Kick Ass is not only pretty violent, but has one of the main characters, who is a 10 year old girl, committing these acts of violence. It's censorship gone wild. La Horde is rated an 18 because of it's gore quotient and it's use of foul language. It's justifiably rated as it is pretty gory. Enough of rants about film censorship in the UK, onto the plot of La Horde...
The Plot:
The plot of La Horde follows a group of elite police officers who at first, you are made to believe they are criminals, as the enter a large housing project with sole purpose of taking out the man responsible for one of their team member's demise. While in the building, all hell breaks loose on the streets of france. The dead are returning to life. No just confined to the streets, the zombies make they're way to the building. When an attack of the zombies, hits the team and the criminals, they realise they must work together if they want to escape the building and reach safety. Old rivalries are put to one side as new ones develop between cops and criminals. As they make they're way down the stairwells of the buildings, they run into an old soldier, as he hacks the zombies to death with an axe, they join up with him and they all attempt to leave the building together.
For anyone who has ever seen Dawn of the Dead, they may well remember the housing projects scene, where the swat team enter, only to come face to face with the resident zombies. Well La Horde is essentially that scene, stretched to 92 minutes, and not only Dawn, but the film borrows heavily from other zombie themed films and even video games. The Zombies in the stairwell, could be looked at as a homage to 28 Days Later, or the parking garage scene is like a part of the game Dead Rising. I don't know whether the film intentionally does this or whether the film is as original and people may perceive it. The films is, when it all boils down to it, a mash up of french actioner District 13, Dawn of the Dead and the Apocalyptic vision of Legion. It's unoriginal and at times a little boring even though the film is meant to be frenetic.
The Cast:
The cast do what they can with the material and they manage to pull it off. The main characters of Ade, Ouessem and Auroro are the best of the bunch with the character of Auroro trying to bring a sense of Ripley (Aliens) to the film as a strong, action heroine. Ouessem is the leader of the police and knows that they have a better chance of getting out alive if they work to gether and Nigerian gangster Ade agrees.
Like i said these three are the best of the bunch and the only other decent character is the old war Vet out for one last triumpant killing spree armed with an Axe and then a M60 machine gun. Theses four do well in the film.
The Direction:
The main problem with the direction of the film is that when it's being filmed in the dark, it's not lit properly and is just darkness, at times its difficult to work out what is going on. The film also has a sort of sepia tint to it making it look almost yellow in parts. This is quite off putting. The scenes of all the zombie chaos are handled well and the action moves at a speedy pace. Some of the zombie kills are pretty good but for some reason none of the characters ever aim straight for the head. They each empty round after round, she after shell into the zombies but somehow manage to never hit the head. This frustrated me to no-end. the Parking Garage scene is probably the best shot sequence of the film. A set piece involving tones of zombies surrounding Ouessem as he attempts to hold off the horde as the others escape. But this scene is still frustrating, he knows there are going to be hundreds of them and goes up against them with two hand guns and a machete, two of the characters had machine guns and grenades. he could have thrown a grenade and taken half of them out that way, then ripped through the rest with the M60. The Film has many many flaws.
My Final Verdict:
I Feel i am betraying the genre i love so much by giving this a negative review, but it just doesn't seem to bring me anything new. Ive seen it all before and better. To be fair to the french, they are keeping the genre going and not relying on remakes, but if this is what they're going to give us, then i'll stick with the remakes. La Horde is immensely flawed and sometime this can add to it's likeability, but it's not good, it's just frustrating. The one thing that impressed me the most about this film was the fact that the four main characters were the only ones holding the film together. I've seen my fair share of zombie films, some good, some bad and i don't want to put this in that bad catagory, it's gonna have to go in the take it or leave it category. If you can rent it, by all means go ahead, there are worse films you could waste your money on (Clash Of The Titans) but save your money if your planing on purchasing it. Go for either Dawn of the Dead Remake, 28 Days/Weeks Later or go old school and pick up some classic Romero or Fulci, which i should add, Dawn and Day of Romero's Zombie saga have been released in the UK in some stunning special editions on DVD and Blu-ray by Arrow Video. The Same Company has also released Fulci's City of the Living dead in a remastered DVD and Blu-Ray and soon will be releasing the directors The Beyond. Any way enough product placement. Time for my score....
LA HORDE
FILM: 4/10
!!!!!!!!!WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!
Ah....the Zombie, the living dead, the flesh eaters. I love a good Zombie film, i don't know what attracts me more to the zombie genre more than say vampires or werewolves, it could be that most zombie films rely on isolation as a theme or what you would do in a situation where the dead had returned to life, or could even be that the science behind zombification seems more plausible than vampirism or becoming a werewolf. Either way, they are the more intriguing of the horror monsters. |The First proper zombie film i ever saw was George A Romero's Dawn Of The Dead and that opened my eyes to a world of living dead flicks. Films such as Lucio Fulci's Zombie and Stuart Gordon's Re-animator, i also discovered that a lot of amateur film makers were trying their hands at this sub genre of horror. Small Indie pics like Zombies of Mass Destruction, Dead Air and Automaton Transfusion, These films were made on a miniature budget compared to the likes of the Dawn Of The Dead Remake and to an extent 28 Days Later. after the Later film and the introduction of the running 'zombie', the genre became more popular and not only in the U.K and America, Europe were also joining the zombie band wagon. The Dutch film, Dead Snow is one example, another is the Spanish film [REC]*. In recent years, the French have upped the stakes in the gore film ledger, with films like Switch-blade Romance and Martyrs, and now they've joined the ranks of the zombie elite. In the last year we've not only had one film but two, Mutants and La Horde. It's the Latter that I am about to review.
La Horde is the kind of film we've seen a million times, well zombie film that is. The plot is quite familiar but i'll get into that in a moment. Like i stated in my opening paragraph, the french seem to be the ones to turn to for gore films these days because with the MPAA and the BBFC, everything seems as though it should be toned down and with recent cuts to A Serbian Film and I Spit on Your Grave Remake, it looks as though the U.K is heading for another Video Nasties problem. The strange thing about the amount of violence we see on our screens here in the U.K is that unlike the U.S we do not have an option of releasing a film unrated. When you look at the British film Eden Lake, a film that is sadistically violent with it's violence aimed at a woman and her husband., the film gets passed uncut. Eden Lake is in the same Vein as Straw Dogs only minus the rape, but it's still a shocking piece of cinema, then you look at a film like Kick Ass which i believe should have been rated an 18 and not a 15, if the BBFC are going to do that, then they might as well rate it a 12A. Kick Ass is not only pretty violent, but has one of the main characters, who is a 10 year old girl, committing these acts of violence. It's censorship gone wild. La Horde is rated an 18 because of it's gore quotient and it's use of foul language. It's justifiably rated as it is pretty gory. Enough of rants about film censorship in the UK, onto the plot of La Horde...
The Plot:
The plot of La Horde follows a group of elite police officers who at first, you are made to believe they are criminals, as the enter a large housing project with sole purpose of taking out the man responsible for one of their team member's demise. While in the building, all hell breaks loose on the streets of france. The dead are returning to life. No just confined to the streets, the zombies make they're way to the building. When an attack of the zombies, hits the team and the criminals, they realise they must work together if they want to escape the building and reach safety. Old rivalries are put to one side as new ones develop between cops and criminals. As they make they're way down the stairwells of the buildings, they run into an old soldier, as he hacks the zombies to death with an axe, they join up with him and they all attempt to leave the building together.
For anyone who has ever seen Dawn of the Dead, they may well remember the housing projects scene, where the swat team enter, only to come face to face with the resident zombies. Well La Horde is essentially that scene, stretched to 92 minutes, and not only Dawn, but the film borrows heavily from other zombie themed films and even video games. The Zombies in the stairwell, could be looked at as a homage to 28 Days Later, or the parking garage scene is like a part of the game Dead Rising. I don't know whether the film intentionally does this or whether the film is as original and people may perceive it. The films is, when it all boils down to it, a mash up of french actioner District 13, Dawn of the Dead and the Apocalyptic vision of Legion. It's unoriginal and at times a little boring even though the film is meant to be frenetic.
The Cast:
The cast do what they can with the material and they manage to pull it off. The main characters of Ade, Ouessem and Auroro are the best of the bunch with the character of Auroro trying to bring a sense of Ripley (Aliens) to the film as a strong, action heroine. Ouessem is the leader of the police and knows that they have a better chance of getting out alive if they work to gether and Nigerian gangster Ade agrees.
Like i said these three are the best of the bunch and the only other decent character is the old war Vet out for one last triumpant killing spree armed with an Axe and then a M60 machine gun. Theses four do well in the film.
The Direction:
The main problem with the direction of the film is that when it's being filmed in the dark, it's not lit properly and is just darkness, at times its difficult to work out what is going on. The film also has a sort of sepia tint to it making it look almost yellow in parts. This is quite off putting. The scenes of all the zombie chaos are handled well and the action moves at a speedy pace. Some of the zombie kills are pretty good but for some reason none of the characters ever aim straight for the head. They each empty round after round, she after shell into the zombies but somehow manage to never hit the head. This frustrated me to no-end. the Parking Garage scene is probably the best shot sequence of the film. A set piece involving tones of zombies surrounding Ouessem as he attempts to hold off the horde as the others escape. But this scene is still frustrating, he knows there are going to be hundreds of them and goes up against them with two hand guns and a machete, two of the characters had machine guns and grenades. he could have thrown a grenade and taken half of them out that way, then ripped through the rest with the M60. The Film has many many flaws.
My Final Verdict:
I Feel i am betraying the genre i love so much by giving this a negative review, but it just doesn't seem to bring me anything new. Ive seen it all before and better. To be fair to the french, they are keeping the genre going and not relying on remakes, but if this is what they're going to give us, then i'll stick with the remakes. La Horde is immensely flawed and sometime this can add to it's likeability, but it's not good, it's just frustrating. The one thing that impressed me the most about this film was the fact that the four main characters were the only ones holding the film together. I've seen my fair share of zombie films, some good, some bad and i don't want to put this in that bad catagory, it's gonna have to go in the take it or leave it category. If you can rent it, by all means go ahead, there are worse films you could waste your money on (Clash Of The Titans) but save your money if your planing on purchasing it. Go for either Dawn of the Dead Remake, 28 Days/Weeks Later or go old school and pick up some classic Romero or Fulci, which i should add, Dawn and Day of Romero's Zombie saga have been released in the UK in some stunning special editions on DVD and Blu-ray by Arrow Video. The Same Company has also released Fulci's City of the Living dead in a remastered DVD and Blu-Ray and soon will be releasing the directors The Beyond. Any way enough product placement. Time for my score....
LA HORDE
FILM: 4/10
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