The news reports are coming in about a major incident at a holiday complex known as The ReZort, where the remnants of the zombie outbreak of around half a decade ago can be shot for sport by the holidaymakers in attendance. Those undead led to a war that threatened the entire world, but now the last vestiges are kept on an island off the coast of Africa for sport, as after all the ones that remain are now slow and not much of a danger - it would be the freshly turned you had to look out for, and there are none of those left. However, as the information begins to trickle down to the media outlets, it becomes clear there have been serious repercussions from a sudden crisis there; anything to worry about?
It's a zombie movie, there's always something to worry about, and if you think you'd seen it all before in this genre, well, er, you may have been correct, but somehow director Steve Barker, not changing his tune after two Outpost films, managed to concoct something halfway original out of something by now very familiar. The gimmick here was that the undead were part of a holiday camp, essentially, where they were the prey for the tourists who took great pleasure in shooting 'em in the head, but if you had seen Westworld (original movie or TV remake) then you would be some way ahead of the characters, even though most of this was in the form of a flashback to some days before.
Where it capitalised on this concept was in its social commentary, an aspect not every zombie effort was tending to delve into as the genre wore on, but one which had a neat idea behind it that had you reassessing all that had gone before when you discovered the precise provenance of the shuffling bodies used for target practice. No, they were not kidnapped tourists, though that would have been an interesting irony, but from a subject much in the news of the day; to say more would be too give too much away, and besides Barker was intent on delivering a solid fright film perhaps more than he was on the message making, all that being the very bitter icing on a rancid cake, should that whet your appetite.
It would if you wanted a horror experience, one presumes, and while the gore was not hugely imaginative, there was plenty of it, mostly gunshot wounds and tearing out of throats by zombie teeth. In addition, The ReZort demonstrated the benefits of a good location, as Palma in Spain provided an appropriately picturesque backdrop to the mayhem, the sort of area that you could imagine a holiday would make a reasonable prospect to stick around in for a week or two. That said, quite how much entertainment you could gain from shooting slow-moving corpses was a moot point, as you imagine this diverting for a few hours but growing pretty repetitive unless you were really into gunning down an easy target. Then again, maybe that was not so farfetched in itself, a lot of people do love gunplay.
As for our protagonist, she was Melanie, played by Australian actress Jessica De Gouw, who had reluctantly gone on this vacation as encouraged by her psychiatrist and her boyfriend Lewis (Martin McCann) to work out and get over a trauma in her recent past. She acted as the conscience of the piece, questioning the impulse that would lead people to flock to such an exclusive (and presumably expensive) refuge to take out their frustrations on barely animated marks, not a consideration that entered the head of every zombie fiction, and one worth contemplating when it seemed there was a large contingent in real life who would love there to be a genuine zombie outbreak to exercise those itchy trigger fingers. But there would be ample time for the "shufflers" to become something distinctly speedier when sabotage raises its head, which was where the expected tension was raised as Melanie's party were picked off when they got out in the field. Claire Goose was the mastermind behind this, a typically corrupt corporate entity, and Dougray Scott was top-billed but nevertheless a supporting character who was a dab hand with shooting the threats. It may have been a modest production, but it didn't look it; those with zombie fatigue may be pleasantly surprised by its just interesting enough innovations. Music by ZacarÃas M. de la Riva.
