Humans vs. Zombies Blu-ray Review
Not Quite as Advertised
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, June 30, 2012
Having tried his hand at the creature feature with
Boggy Creek: The Legend Is True, low-budget
horror-meister Brian T. Jaynes has moved on to the zombie flick with
Humans VS Zombies,
which I'll refer to as
HvZ from here on, so that I don't have to stumble over the alternate
forms with which the title's middle word has been printed in different places ("VS"? "vs."? "Versus"?).
The title may seem obvious, but that's the name adopted by the two Goucher College students
who in 2005 created the role-playing game portrayed in the film. The game has its own
website,
and it's sufficiently popular on campuses across the nation that some school authorities moved to
ban or limit it in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, because the game involves mock
"hunting" of zombies with Nerf Blasters (which resemble firearms).
The notion of a mock zombie attack that abruptly becomes the real thing sounds like something
with ingenious "meta" potential that could re-energize the undead genre as
Scream did for
slasher films. Edgar Wright's
Shaun of the Dead had already taken a stab (sorry!) in that direction with
its parade of gags based on the similarities between city dwellers pursuing dead-end routines and
mindless flesh-eaters cannibalizing their friends and neighbors. But now that
HvZ has finally
arrived, it appears that Jaynes and screenwriter Devan Sagliani never got further than the notion
of setting their film on a college campus where an HvZ game is in progress and some of the
participants discover that—whaddya know?—the rules in the "Zombie Apocalypse" handbook
actually work when a secret government virus escapes into the open. Otherwise, the story is
constructed of familiar elements derived from George Romero's
Dead films, the
Resident
Evil
series, the recent remake of
The
Crazies and no doubt others that those better versed in the
zombie genre can readily identify.
(Full disclosure: I gave up on zombie films a long time ago, because, for my, um, taste, most of
the wit went out of them after Romero's original trilogy, with an occasional exception like
Shaun and Danny Boyle's
28 Days Later.)
The official
website for
HvZ features a
misleading synopsis of the film that, in the absence of
anything else, has been widely copied, including here at Blu-ray.com:
Students on summer break are exposed to a deadly
virus, a neuroinvasive organism that is spread rapidly through direct human contact. The Infected are
enslaved by the invading swarm intelligence and driven by an insatiable appetite to consume human flesh.
Returning home, the infection spreads quickly to their fellow classmates and other unsuspecting
townspeople. One by one, more and more fall victim to the plague, triggering an epidemic that spawns a
horde of ravenous zombies.
The zombie horde grows and spreads throughout the community. Amidst the chaos, a campus
security guard, obsessed with conspiracy theories, leads a group of students to safety as they and a
small band of uninfected townspeople set out to find other human survivors in an attempt to
discover the source of the "zombie" virus and save the world.
Notice how there's no reference to the role-playing game? It's almost as if someone were
pitching alternate ideas for what ultimately became
HvZ, after budgetary realities forced
Jaynes and his collaborators to rethink what could be accomplished.
Even so, the finished film is closer to the original concept than the synopsis. For example, there's
no summer break/returning home dynamic to explain the path of infection. The film opens with a
lab accident that plays like a miniature version of the Umbrella Corporation disaster in
Resident
Evil. Cut to the Gulf Coast where oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster is washing up on the
shore of a college town. (Later dialogue will suggest that organisms released to "consume" the
oil are just a cover for the Illuminati to spread the virus—but who really knows about these
things?) An infected man in protective gear appears on the oil-coated shore and encounters a
romantic pair of students on the beach. Zombie mayhem ensues.
The "small band of uninfected townspeople" and the search for the "source of the 'zombie'
virus" promised by the official synopsis are nowhere to be found in the film. What Jaynes does
instead is follow the classic Romero template: He assembles a group of desperate survivors who
have almost as much trouble cooperating among themselves as they do fending off their zombie
attackers. They are, in no particular order: Tommi (Madison Burge), a tomboy gaming expert
who is widely (and incorrectly) suspected of being a lesbian; Amanda (Melissa Carnell), a smart
and sensitive blonde girl; Donny (Jonah Priour), the nerd who, with Tommi, is moderating the
campus game of "HvZ", has an intense crush on Amanda and is also a virgin; James (Jesse
Ferraro), a star football player and Donny's roommate, who has an intense crush on Tommi
(because, according to Donny, she's the one girl he can't have); and Brad (Chip Joslin), a pudgy
game enthusiast for whom the chance to knock down
real zombies is the macho opportunity of a
lifetime.
The most interesting character in
HvZ is Frank, the conspiracy nut campus security guard who is
the one element that the official synopsis gets right (well, not counting the zombies). He's played
by Frederic Doss (who was the squeamish deputy in
Boggy Creek) in a performance that I would
describe as "realistically wooden". Frank is a veteran of Desert Storm and has spent every hour
since then preparing for a day like this. Unfortunately for everyone else, he turns out to have been
mostly right. If Frank seems like a character in a bad "B" movie, it's because that's how he's
imagined himself all these years. This allows him to keep a cool head when the crisis arrives, but
other than his shotgun Frank doesn't have much of a contingency plan. He comes to the rescue of
the besieged students and helps them find a way off campus, but options are quickly shrinking as
the zombie horde rapidly expands. Just as in Romero's films, all the odds are stacked against the
living. And whoever is peering down from the satellite views that occasionally zoom out to
observe the proceedings shows no inclination to help, just as in Breck Eisner's remake of
The
Crazies.
Hard-core gore fans may feel short-changed, since Jaynes didn't have the budget for the kind of
elaborate dismemberment and flaunting of entrails that Tom Savini first perfected in
Dawn of the
Dead. But Jaynes makes the most of his limited budget, and he edits cleverly to suggest more
than he shows. Judged by the standard of a do-it-yourself independent film,
HvZ represents
measurable progress in a career worth watching. With more originality in the script, it could have
been a classic.
Humans vs. Zombies Blu-ray, Video Quality
After the serious issues that plagued
Boggy Creek: The Legend Is True, I'm pleased to report
that the 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of
HvZ arrives in much better shape, though not without
issues. It's clear from the film's credits and its appearance that it was shot on hi-def video,
although the type of equipment isn't specified. (IMDb says it was the Red One system, but that
seems to be their default entry for any digitally acquired film.) Except as noted below, the results
are sharp, clean, colorful and devoid of video noise. Black levels are very good, as are contrast
and shadow detail. Issues such as artificial sharpening and high frequency filtering do not
apply.
There were no signs of the combing errors that occurred repeatedly in
Boggy Creek, but several shots showed a
kind of digital "streaking" as if someone had loaded them into a digital paint program and drawn
brush strokes across a portion of the frame. A representative sample appears in screenshot
number 6 accompanying this review. Whether this phenomenon is an issue resulting from the
original image capture (and couldn't be fixed in post-production) or an error introduced as a
result of color correction or effects work is impossible to say, but it suggests that Jaynes has yet
to gain full control over the logistics of his craft.
