Undead

 Here's another Australian zombie apocalypse movie directed by two brothers that gets by on cheap CGI effects, lots of gore, an outlandish concept and industrial amounts of enthusiasm. Made about a decade before the first Wyrmwood film, too.

 Undead was written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, who pooled their life savings to finance it (giving them the producer role as well, by default). It's a very bloody piss take on 50's sci-fi schlock with a plot that's got more than a passing resemblance to Plan 9 From Outer Space.

 Things kick off with René (Felicity Mason, doing a lot of her acting just with her striking grey eyes) trying to get out of the small Australian fishing town of Berkeley on the same day that meteorites start falling from the sky and turn people into ghouls. The undead invasion puts a hamper on her plans, so she's forced to take shelter in a derelict farm along with a young couple (Rob Jenkins and Lisa Cunningham) and two police officers (Dirk Hunter and Emma Randall). Said farm is actually something called "Marion's World of Weapons", and Marion (Mungo McKay) lurks inside, armed to the teeth.

 Fortunately for everyone, he's the good kind of well-armed survivalist nutjob: one who had a forewarning of the doomsday, and turned out to be right. He carries around a triple shotgun (reminded me of the sword from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and pulls silly/cool moves like throwing his guns in the air, shooting a zombie with a shotgun, then catching the guns again and shooting two more zombies. His usage of spurs got a chuckle.

 Because this is a zombie movie, you have to have internecine tension. In this case, the policeman turns out to be an incompetent dick, and no one trusts poor Marion despite the fact that he saves their bacon multiple times. And there's also the matter of this not being your garden variety day of the dead; there's a sort of acid rain, rays of light sucking people and crickets up into the sky, a newly-built wall around the whole of the town, mysterious robed figures...

 The plot ends up making some amount of sense (as long as you don't look at it too closely or start asking questions), but the script is... well, it's not very good. That it's mainly a purposefully kitsch comedy excuses a lot of the internal consistency and logic issues, but then you're left with gags that just aren't very funny, and the actors aren't up to redeeming either the comedy or the action. Poor McKay really struggles with selling Marion as an Ash-like badass, and the less said of some of the others' relentless mugging the better.

 It strikes me as a film that was designed with the visuals in mind, and had the rest hitched to them later. And there's some varied and striking imagery to be found here; It's heavily stylized, too, which helps it look good despite its homemade quality and desaturated palette. The gore is also fun, with maybe a little more in the way of physical blood and prosthesis than other films like this (though some of the CGI, being low budget and two decades old, is pretty bad).

 Despite its superficial similarities, it's unfair to compare it to the Wyrmwood movies - those were much more straightforward in their ambitions. Unfortunately, Undead kind of fails in its own terms, but it's an interesting, likeable, and entertaining sort of failure. It did serve its purpose as a calling card, letting the Spierigs go on to helm two of the more idiosyncratic sci fi films of the following decade.