Devils Playground

   "Parkour Zombies in London" might have been a better title for this English outbreak flick. At the very least naming it that would have cleared up any confusion as to which Devils Playground it was.

    There's virtually no new ideas within this film, everything in it has been done time and time again. But, if originality were a criteria for success in zombie films, then 98 percent of them would fail. This movie does what it does, original or not, fairly well. Good characters, interesting enough dialogue/ human interaction and plenty of interest worthy plot points and twists to keep the viewer engaged for most of this movie. Danny Dyer (Severance, Doghouse, Dead Cert), Jaime Murray (Botched, The Deaths of Ian Stone) head up a cast of memory teasing British B-rates that do the job as well as can be expected. As far as script and star power is concerned, there's not a lot of allure here nor is there any large turn offs.

   Now the zombies are definitely the most remarkable part of this one, but not for any traditional reasons. Their uniqueness lies in that they are born of performance enhancing drug trials gone wrong, making them not only fast and vicious, but prone to unnecessary stunts. As you watch this movie, you will notice, as I did, that the ghouls always seem to take the most athletically challenging route to get to the victims, i.e. vaulting a dumpster they could just run around, or leaping down two flights of stairs, and virtually every time there is a wall around, they choose to do a a footplant or jump kick off of it......All of this is fairly amusing, but given the general seriousness of the rest of the film, it's also very distracting. The make up is generic, at best, featuring your run of the mill overly discolored veins popping out on all of the infected and decent bites and other fiend attack related wounds. The one main disappointment I had with the violence was the feeding piles, usually you find the best gore work within these scenes in zombie films. But this move chose to cop out and cover up all the happenings with the writhings of way too many ghouls. Disappointing.

 This film isn't going to make any converts out of those who don't enjoy zombie horror, but it's not going to too badly disappoint those who already are, either.  All in all, just another movie that's kinda takin' up space.



6/10 detached retinas