Well it’s award season in Hollywood. All that really means are celebrities I don’t care about will get awards for movies I’ve never seen. That’s life. However, one of the big movies getting a lot of buzz is Zero Dark Thirty. You know the one about the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden? Sure, I guess if you like Hollywood “fantasy” it’s probably a good watch – if you like that sort of thing. Not me though. Around here I like to get down to business and dig through the crap to find a movie bold and daring enough to tell the obviously true story about what –really- happened. That’s where Osombie comes in.
I remember seeing advertisements for this movie a short while ago and my first reaction was a bit of a surprise. Not surprised so much that there was an upcoming movie about an undead Osama but rather that people to my knowledge weren’t making a big stink about it. I was reminded of a time not too long ago when Towers of Terror –the film about zombie terrorist and the 9/11 attacks- was making a lot of genre fans upset. I just assumed that people weren’t ready for exploitation about that just yet. Then, I realized that this isn’t a movie about 9/11 but Osama Bin Laden.
Osombie is a story about an elite squad of soldiers. That is really just some of the NATO forces still left behind in Afghanistan. They’re battling small pockets of undead. This is common knowledge to them, and they dispatch the zombies with comic book levels of gunplay and swordsmanship. For some reason an American soldier has a katana on her back. Not sure if that’s standard issue or not.
The soldiers run in to a civilian women and her guide under attack, and find out she’s there looking for her brother. The woman’s brother is on a one man mission to take out Osama bin Laden, who was officially killed in the now famous mission. Despite what the official reports say it’s widely rumoured that Osama Bin Laden is back from the dead, thanks to some chemical compound.
There is a certain expectation I had going in to this movie. I was expecting a plot where soldiers started encountering undead and we were to learn (after a lot of digging) that behind it all was Bin Laden, who is now turned in to some sort of super zombie. It would end with a climactic battle between our heroes and a deranged zombie overlord. Sadly, it’s not even close to that.
What we have is; the audience being told exactly what happened, how and why from the very beginning. We spend the majority of the film listening to this group of soldiers prattle on and on with barely formulated opinions about the current war on terror while at the same time trying to figure out what we (the audience) already know. This has always been a particular pet peeve of mine and while I get that you pretty much lose out on mystery when you choose to name your movie Osombie but, I would at least like the how, why and what not told to me in the first five minutes.
There is a lot of talking for this kind of film. I mean a lot. It’s strange to me how serious this movie seems to take itself in some moments then in others there is a cartoon level of action and violence. In some misguided attempts to remind us that this is a zombie film, during most of these extended dialogue scenes a character will be head-shotting the undead with really obvious (and sub-par) CGI. I’m not one to crap on low budget movies CGI but I really can’t stand computer blood. It just doesn’t look good. It really doesn’t help that a lot of these shots are in broad daylight which is very unforgiving with those kinds of special effects.
With a little bit of script editing this movie could have been a pretty decent step in to the world of the zombie-terrorist movie. While it’s no completely unwatchable it was definitely not worth the 12 bucks I paid for it. If you’re a zombie nut and you’ve been curious about this title, sure, give it a look but for everyone else who’s tired of the undead, I’d say head-shot this one and keep on walking.
