ZOMBIE DAWN (aka MUERTE CIEGA, 2012)

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Directed/Written by Cristian Toledo, Lucio A. Rojas

ZOMBIE DAWN is low budget zombie horror done right. It has that gritty feel as if it were made right about the same time as DAWN OF THE DEAD while embracing films like Peckinpah and the old spaghetti westerns by focusing on a morally grey merc and his men. Colonel Rainoff (Cristian Ramos) leads a group of mercs into a quarantined war zone filled with zombies in order to find any who may have survived a zombie holocaust and possibly a cure to the outbreak. Though the zombies have been contained in a walled off area, a cure to the outbreak has not been found. With the promise of big money guiding them, the mercs lead two doctors through zombie hordes and abandoned buildings across a rugged South American landscape.

ZOMBIE DAWN shines when it embraces its South American landscape. Much like last year’s THE DEAD, which cast the zombie apocalypse against an African backdrop, ZOMBIE DAWN shows the viewer the sights and sounds of a desolate, cruel, and barren South America made worse by flesh-eating zombies. The locale is a huge factor in why this indie zeek is so effective, almost taking on a role itself in this story.

Though the narrative is heavy at times, the words spoken by Rainoff provide a nice Man Without a Name vibe. Ramos plays Rainoff as not particularly a good man, but one driven by money, but wise enough to know that no good will come from his lifestyle. He’s a gritty 70’s action hero cast in this modern zombie movie, but somehow he fits extremely well as his performance is by far the best of the film.

Though I wish some of the rest of Rainoff’s mercs would have been developed more, they do provide as good fodder for the zombies. Though we know it from the start, these are bad men leading these scientists through this desolate wasteland, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from tossing in a rape scene to make sure we really know these guys are not altar boys.

Heavy on CGI blood, though light on practical zombie effects, ZOMBIE DAWN is less about the zombies as it is about the bad men left to live in a zombie filled world. Some may be turned off by the high amount of CGI blood. I often find it distracting as for some reason no one seems to know how to make blood spurt with realism these days. Still, the scenes of zombie violence resonate as they overcome and overpower almost everyone. Though those scenes are horrifying enough, writers/directors Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas have done their homework in zombie lore casting the humans as the truly despicable ones.

ZOMBIE DAWN is gorgeously shot and has a helluva ending to boot. There are a lot of zombie films out there these days, but few of them get it right as much as ZOMBIE DAWN does.