Verdict
Summary
A very competently produced and directed zombie apocalypse action film, Day Zero is more or less what you should expect in this day and age when we’ve seen pretty much everything in every style, language, and persuasion in terms of how the world ends with zombies in the mix.
Plot:
The zombie apocalypse begins in the Philippines, and an ex-Special Forces convict must escape prison and fight his way to his family.
Review:
A dengue outbreak in the Philippines mutates into a horrific zombie apocalypse, and within hours the entire country is experiencing a full-on assault by the undead rising again and infected patients sprinting all over the place in a haphazard dash to infect more and move on. There’s a catch: The zombies seem to be blind, but their hearing in fully intact and so it becomes a chaotic learning curve for the uninfected to try to survive the first day of infection … day zero. An ex-Special Forces commando named Emon (Brandon Vera) has been biding his time for eight years while incarcerated for assault, and he’s finally told he’ll be pardoned for good behavior, but after a fracas with a bunch of murderous inmates, he gets thrown into the hole and his pardon is revoked. His only hope in life is to meet his eight year-old deaf daughter for the first time, and while imprisoned, he’s learned how to sign. When the zombie apocalypse gets going, there’s chaos in the prison (and everywhere else), and suddenly the doors are all opened, and there’s a stampede by all the prisoners in their mad dash to escape, leaving Emon and a fellow buddy inmate of his to fight their way out of prison and make their way to the streets in a stolen ambulance to the low income area where his wife and daughter live. Meanwhile, the apartment complex (which seems to by at least three or four stories high) is overrun with the infected, and Emon’s wife and daughter get separated, which gets complicated because the little girl is deaf and no one seems to realize it. By the time Emon and his buddy get to the complex, they have their work cut out for them to make their way to the top floor where straggling survivors have managed to congregate while keeping the hordes of zombies at bay.
A very competently produced and directed zombie apocalypse action film, Day Zero is more or less what you should expect in this day and age when we’ve seen pretty much everything in every style, language, and persuasion in terms of how the world ends with zombies in the mix. This one has some very hard hitting martial arts John Wick-type gunplay in it, and there’s a lengthy one-against-many centerpiece fight where Vera takes on at least thirty or forty zombies all by himself, and that scene alone is worth sitting down for this 82-minute movie. It becomes very clear that the apocalypse is fully underway by the end of the movie, so fans of the genre should appreciate this one. It reminded me of Siege of the Dead and The Horde. From director Joey De Guzman.
Well Go USA’s Blu-ray release of Day Zero comes with a few bonus trailers, and there’s also a DVD edition.
