Redcon-1 **
Dir:
Chee Keong Cheung. With: Oris Erhuero, Carlos Gallardo, Mark Strange, Katarina
Leigh Waters. 115 mins. Cert: 18
It’s
been sixteen years since Danny Boyle’s 28
Days Later… and just over a decade since its sequel – which is to say a
fair while has passed since a homegrown zombie movie scaled up to theatrical
proportions rather than shuffling towards video on demand. (Your reviewer
retains a soft spot for 2012’s Cockneys vs. Zombies, with its irresistible combination of Richard Briers,
anti-gentrification wisdom and Chas Hodges theme tune, but that was always
bound for regular post-pub rotation on the Horror Channel.) This legitimately
widescreen indie endeavour – in which emerging tyro Chee Keong Cheung curates
apocalyptic visions of Albion on interesting Rochdale and Glasgow locations –
is finally undermined by rookie errors, but otherwise takes a half-decent shot
at using its modest budget to fill that gap.
If
anything, Cheung displays that fanboyish tendency to give the audience more
than they might actually need. He opens with a jolting barrage of hyper-grim
imagery grabbed from anywhere and everywhere; his attack scenes pile on
splatter and ear-splitting howls in a manner that leaves Boyle, generally
regarded as the Zebedee of modern cinema, looking subdued. Such out-of-the-gate
enthusiasm is infectious to some degree, but the appealing cleanliness of the
initial narrative line – multiracial Special Forces are gradually picked off
while retrieving a cure-touting doctor from a biohazard zone – is soon
compromised by switchback after switchback.
It peaks too soon: after the relentless, jugular-targeting confrontations of its first hour, some of its invention and force can be felt bleeding out over the long-seeming second. Yet this director is still capable of reaching deep into his spacious if sometimes ungainly tombola of tropes and pulling out a funny, bleak, original image. Amid an appreciable cross-section of the undead (S&M zombies! Community Support zombies!), I particularly enjoyed the zombie postie, found mid-round, rabidly tossing letters into long-abandoned gardens. (We’ve all known mail workers like that.) Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action; if somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.
Redcon-1 opens in selected cinemas from today.
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