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34%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #10,348
...out of 20,698 movies
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A meltdown at a nuclear power plant turns a bunch of folks into lethal shambling flesh-eating zombies who go on a gory rampage.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: May 8, 2007
I have a soft spot in my heart for low budget zombie movies, especially the ones in which it's blatantly obvious that the filmmakers had a true love for the genre and weren't merely doing it because it was the simplest thing that they could put together with their meager budgets. However, I have to admit that the market flooding that has occurred over the last couple of years has really started to kill that off, but whenever a new one comes out, I always hold out hope that maybe - just maybe - this newest release will turn out to be great. Tonight's film was created before the flood really started so I have to give them points for not being just another cash-in, but is it worth your time? Well... maybe.
The storyline is the very definition of threadbare. There's an accident at the local nuclear power plant which exposes all of the workers to radiation, an event which prompts the government to come in and shut the place down. Now, they don't do the sensible things one would expect in this situation such as evacuating the survivors, burying the dead, and cleaning up the mess; no sir, they merely bulldoze everything that was above ground, bury the rest, and build a new town over it. Five years later, a group of kids are out shooting a home movie (I suppose art really does imitate life) and stumble upon a hole in the ground which somehow causes the dead power plant workers to come back to life in order to feast on the living. There you have it: the plot of Zombie Bloodbath.
Before you read any further, I should probably point out that this film isn't so much a movie as it is an excuse for director Todd Sheets to show off some zombie carnage. The plot is established within the first twenty minutes or so, and from there, it's simply "humans run, zombies chase, human is torn apart, zombies chase some more" for the rest of the running time. There's a few extra plot devices thrown in towards the end in an effort to explain why these zombies have come back to slaughter the citizens of this town, but they amount to no more than one of the characters finding a government memo and reading pieces from it for the camera.
The acting side of things isn't much better, as the cast is seemingly made up of friends and family of the director. These people are about as convincing as porn stars, but I do have to give them credit for being into their roles: it's readily apparent that everyone involved was enthusiastic about the project, but it's a shame that that didn't translate to talent. I do have to give some credit to the mullet-sporting man (sorry, I didn't catch his name). While the character probably wasn't intended to be comedic, I couldn't help but laugh every time he showed up on screen (and trust me, he pops up a lot). Imagine a scrawny Southern man with a mullet that would make Billy Ray Cyrus proud and a mustache that looks to have come straight off a Three Dog Night album cover, and you may begin to get an idea as to why this man enhanced my viewing pleasure.
However, none of these things are the focal points of the film. The selling point is the zombie carnage, and on that account, the film delivers. According to the end credits, there were over 735 extras used as zombies (I can't confirm that number, but I wouldn't doubt it), and for the most part, the undead look pretty damned good. Sure, there are a few cases of "background zombies" to be found (ie, extras with little or no makeup who are there simply to make the horde look bigger), but a surprisingly large amount of them looked extremely good considering the budget.
The actual look of the zombies is far from being the only saving grace of the film, as they also get more than their share of kills as the running time ticks by. Bodies are torn apart, guts spill out onto the ground, limbs are severed, and it's a veritable bloodbath as these zombies wipe out the town's population. Again, there was some real effort put forth in making these scenes look authentic, and the result of this is a large number of scenes which will have the gorehounds squealing with glee.
So, should you set out to hunt this film down when it's released in June? It all depends on what you look for from a zombie flick: if a good story and solid acting is what you're in the market for, you might as well pass right on over this one. If, however, you're looking for a zombie flick that will deliver about an hour's worth of violence, bloodshed, and general mayhem straight into your living room, you could do a lot worse than this one. For that, I'm going to go with a 6/10.
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