[rating=3]
At the end of “28 Weeks Later”, the screaming British zombies surged through the channel tunnel to upset the Parisians with lack of fashion sense, inadequate language skills (RARGGGHHH) and appalling diet.
The Brits have long admired French fine dining (well, maybe not the snails, frogs and horse meat), so why begrudge them one final chance to eat out abroad?
Okay, so the stars of the “Later” films weren’t zombies in the shuffling Romero sense of the word, they were infected by the rage virus and so were technically alive, but they moved fast and upped the ante in the danger stakes.
This fast/slow zombie conundrum has been with us for a decade now and we’re still no closer to sorting out how we’d like the undead to move when they try to rip us limb from limb. French zombie flick “La Horde” comes down firmly on the side of the sprinters and by doing so makes it an unofficial sequel to the “Later” series of movies.
Mobs have always been big in France, from Robespierre’s Reign of Terror all the way through to the civil unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois that erupted into nationwide riots in 2005. “La Horde” taps into fear of the mob, an urban mass taking to the streets overnight, Sarkozy’s “Scum” raising up to smash the state.
Before the zombies go ballistic, “La Horde” kicks off as a brutal police revenge movie. A hit squad of cops gatecrashes a derelict tower block looking to waste Ade, the Nigerian leader of the multi-racial gang responsible for the death of their colleague.
However these ski-masked assassins are no “Shield” strike team and their plans could do with a serious dose of Vic Mackey cunning as the attack spirals desperately out of control. Meanwhile strange sounds gurgle in the darkness tantalisingly just beyond the reach of the audiences’ gaze.
Co-directors Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher touch on “From Dusk Till Dawn” territory here as they blend their genres without explanation. Like all good zombie apocalypses, theirs just happens; there’s no rhyme or reason to it – it just is. So, logically, it will catch people unawares and cops and criminals are people too. They just have an excuse to have guns to meet the threat head on.
Like “Pontypool”, “La Horde” could be read as a nation’s colonial past coming back from the dead (literally) and feeding off the former empire builders bloated capitalist corpse. Unfortunately ,“La Horde” misses its chance to be a fully-fledged social satire, as the characters are never fully developed.
Still, you don’t need method acting when facing down the dead, you need hard-arsed bastards and both cops and robbers fit this category like a spiked glove. Ade’s gangsters indulge in some seriously dangerous hand-to-hand zombie combat and Ouessem, the leader of the cops, has a set piece that should go down in movie body count history.
On paper, “La Horde” had the makings of a cult classic. In reality, it’s a perfectly functional action movie that lacks the acute cultural commentary needed to make it a genre standard. Perhaps leading with Robespierre’s statement – “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity” – might have given it the tone it was searching for.
What “La Horde” does have in its favour is a zombie straight from a Francis Bacon nightmare, being shot to pieces by a Harvey Keitel look-alike with a serious lack of fire discipline. When you’ve got that, who needs satire?
Ha ha! Upon reading my last paragraph again I think I might have missed a trick.