Descendents (2008) Movie Review
Descendents
Directed by Jorge Olguin
Available from Lionsgate on May 15, 2012
Reviewer: Horrorphilia Jason
The Lowdown: A beautiful looking Chilean post apocalyptic virus/zombie film, that’s tedious and boring.
The film starts off fantastic. There is a beautiful Mobyesque piano tune playing in the background while the star of the movie, a little girl named Camille, explains the background of the story with crayon drawings. She tells the tale of how earth was ravaged by war, famine, and a virus that infects some people and turns them into essentially ravenous zombies. After a few years some of the children that are born have these 3 cuts in each side of the neck and are immune to the virus. Also the infected people for some unexplained reason don’t attack the mutant children.
After that it went downhill. Now this is one of these “artistic” type of horror films that rely on atmosphere and cool visuals rather than actual action. 80% of the movie, Camille is just walking around the countryside heading towards the ocean because she frequently has dreams about it. I can’t say it’s totally action free cuz you do get to see her eat some worms and watch some kids drink some bottled water. I was hoping the movie would evolve into something cool or have some crazy shit happen in the third act but it never came to fruition. Interspersed throughout is flashbacks of how she and her mother was captured by the “soldiers” with gas masks and how she escapes. You get an idea early on of what happened, so the recurring flashbacks are really redundant. You also know that the infected/zombies won’t hurt her so the threat level is almost zero. The only thing she has to worry about are the soldiers trying to kill her.
The prime reason I’m not totally dissing the film, besides the great opening, is the look of the film. The film uses muted colors, gray-scale and sepia tones and looks bad-ass. The sky has an orange tint and the blood is bright red. Really cool looking. Even though the intro song is awesome they unfortunately play it out by repeating it throughout the film. They should have used some type of variation on the theme and it would have worked much better.
Bottom line, the film is boring. Not much happens and when it does, it doesn’t make up for the rest. Some of the gore moments are cool, and when the mother transforms, its a freaky rockin effect. If you want to see another artsy slow zombie movie then I recommend watching Colin over this film. If you wanna see something different then it may be worth a watch, but for most people it’s a skip. I do give it somewhat props for the ending. Doesn’t really make much sense but it was a cool touch nonetheless.
Final Rating: 4.5/10
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