Remains

Title: Remains
Director: Colin Theys
Writer: John Doolan
Cast: Miko Hughes, Lance Reddick, Grant Bowler, Evalena Marie, Tawny Cypress, Anthony Marks
Min: 88
Year: 2011

An accident has led to the zombie apocalypse. Two survivors in Reno, Neveda, who had a past relationship with each other, hide in a casino. They must now battle the flesh hungry hoards of the living dead.

This is an adaptation of Steve (30 Days of Night) Niles' comic of the same made by horror cable channel, Chiller TV as their first feature. I have never read the Niles' comic, so I'm going to rate this one on it's own merits.

With that said, I find this movie to be highly derivative of many other zombie movies. The movie has fast zombies, and then at the climax faster zombies, which I loathe, and they clearly ripped off from the Dawn of the Dead remake. Throw in the whole, "hey we're trapped in one place" and the military popping up and you have a film that pillages from all of the major movies of this kind that you can think of. I will say this, though, I wouldn't mind getting stuck in a nice casino/ hotel (though I would pick Vegas over Reno). In fact, I think I might enjoy getting stuck in there even more than I would at a mall!

The new things it adds to the zombie mythos are that zombies do in fact sleep, albeit standing up, and that they eat other are not particularly interesting. That last point leads me to say this, I thought zombies don't cannibalize each other because they prefer fresh meat. Oh well, I guess this movie ignores that or has decided to change that. Whatever.

To it's advantage there is some good acting, more so from our two leads. Miko Hughes, who dealt played zombie as little Gage in Pet Sementary, is quite good as our hero who has past. But, the real highlight, for me, was the gorgeous Evalena Marie. She plays a tough, badass, at times bitchy heroine in Tori. Plus, she looks fucking hot as hell in her denim shorts and cowboy boots. I, dear readers, was in love.

There is also some pretty good gore including flesh-eating, bloody squibs, impalings, and fingers getting sliced off. It has a good pace, but like I said before; there is the whole feeling of I've been here and done this, and done this better. So while it ain't boring, it won't really hold much of your interest either. Well, other than any time that we can get look at Marie's great legs, anyway.

I can't really say that this movie is worth catching. It's not horrible, it's not good. It's sort of just there.

** out of ****

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