REVIEW: Ozombie (2012)

This review could not have been possible without the help of Aaron, whose knowledge of weapons was instrumental in understanding the colossal wrongness of much of the film.

I was away on vacation last week, and from my excursions I’ve brought you all a special treat…

Director: John Lyde
Starring: Corey Sevier, Eve Mauro
Website: N/A....

"I had a Pokemon problem."

-A very obvious Digimon fan in the Special Forces group in the movie

Yes, a movie about a zombie Osama Bin Laden coming back from the dead; I really can’t even make this shit up. Although they do now have a movie about Abraham Lincoln killing vampires, but then again, that’s a major Hollywood production based on a comic book. This is probably the worst zombie movie have ever seen in my life. It’s got awful acting, awful characters, awful storytelling…it’s just awful! But then again, I haven’t seen a better candidate for one of my reviews in a while.

As an added bonus, this isn't even released in the U.S. yet, and I found it in London. So you Americans are getting an extra early treat for this sucker! Aren't you feeling special right now? Let’s dig into this crapsack void of anything worth watching and lose what's left of our sanity!

We start off with a trailer for the new Call of Duty game:

They kill Osama Bin Laden and take him back in their helicopter, although I guess they didn’t plan this out too well as he comes back to life as a zombie and makes the helicopter crash into the Arabian Sea! I’m so glad this movie is historically accurate. Then we see a few magazine models getting undressed and going for a nice swim in the ocean at the sunset. These sunset shots are quite nice, so I’ll give the movie a score of one star.

However…

Yes, that’s the zombie makeup we’re going for in this movie. It looks like something you’d see in Party City’s discount $3 bin, but hey, at least the movie has great insightful writing and compelling characters to make up for that!

…heh…heh heh heh…

Okay, so we then meet our gang of Special Forces Task Members. There’s one guy who likes to fight with his shirt off, because hey, if it makes you more vulnerable AND a bigger target to your enemies, it’s TOTALLY a good idea. And then there’s this chick, who fights with a katana, because…well, I guess she just thinks having a hand-combat weapon is more efficient than using those pesky guns and killing her enemies from far away…oh, wait, it doesn’t do that at all! Man, these guys are morons! What kind of special task force is this? The literal Special Ed task force from the short bus?

What are you, an idiot? Put a goddamn shirt on! You're not tanning at the beach, you're fighting in a war!

THIS! IS! AFGHANISTAN! Also, when the bombs explode in this movie, how come they never have a blast radius of more than half a centimeter? Yeah, because explosions don't do any damage to anything but the one thing they actually hit, right? Realism at its finest!

One of them gets bit by a zombie that sneaks up behind him, even though everyone else on the team facing him should have been able to see it, so it’s just stupid. Then it bites him and he just sort of brushes it off like a mosquito bite, not appearing to be in much pain at all. Yeah, it’s only a zombie bite! Wouldn’t have you screaming in pain at all, would it? It’s just like being pinched in the neck a little.

Katana girl does not use her katana to kill him but an actual gun! So I guess she does just choose to use the sword because she thinks it looks cool. I’m not usually one to discriminate based on gender, but…yyyyeeeeaaaahhhh…this chick should’ve been kept in the kitchen.

Hahahahahaha.....ehhh, no.

So after that we see some girl dressed like she’s ready for a tour of Antarctica sitting with a stereotypical Muslim man talking about how she wants to find her brother, who was some nutbar who came to see if Osama Bin Laden was dead or not, and if not, wanted to kill him. Like idiots they can’t hear the zombies as they sneak up on them. The Muslim man dies and the woman lives to become a main character – this scene was entirely pointless except as a juvenile exposition dump. Yay!

The girl teams up with the Idiot Special Forces team after they kill all the zombies, and they all bitch and moan about having to bring her along, yet do it anyway I guess. Then we get some more exposition from the Idiot Special Forces as they explain to the girl that the Taliban are making zombies – only instead of just saying that, we get like a five minute dragging and slow scene of them overexplaining it! I’m so invested I could just crap rainbows!

And then there’s a scene of her and Mr. Shirtless getting to know each other and flirting? Color me delighted; this movie knows how to keep an audience interested! Because when I watch a movie with a zombified Osama Bin Laden on the cover, what I wanted to see was people flirting. Good job!

Then we see the girl’s crazy Bin Laden hunting brother, Woody Harrelson stunt double, as he teams up with some little Arab kid who has been separated from his family. They try to talk a little although they speak different languages. Then the brother sees some Arab people and gives the little kid to them, and…that’s really about it. What was the purpose of this scene? Did that kid’s story really merit inclusion in the film? It was barely even three minutes long! Maybe they didn’t even script this part and just literally found a kid in the desert and helped him go home. I don’t know. But it did serve the purpose of making the movie 90 minutes, so I guess that was the only criteria.

Aaaand you've just witnessed the happy ending to a completely different movie!

And okay, this next scene is pretty friggin’ bad. It’s another attempt at a ‘zombie invasion fight’ that this movie keeps trying and utterly failing at every time. And it’s just awful in so many ways! Like how about how the guy has this huge sniper rifle-looking thing that can literally just make the zombies disintegrate on contact? I didn’t know zombies were made of elastic balloon like material that just pops and explodes! And also, why is the guy holding that thing like a regular gun when he should be just setting it down to use its scope? I’m not even a weapons expert and even I know better than these people! Doing at least the minimal amount of research isn’t going to kill you, you hacks!

Also, this line: “Haven’t seen a group this big since they opened a Wal-Mart in my town.” That speaks for itself. Movie, stop trying to write funny dialogue. YOU’RE REALLY NOT GOOD AT IT. See, you even made me use all caps again!

And finally, when one of the guys gets bit, he makes the decision to go in and blow himself up with a grenade to kill the zombies. However, before he can let the grenade go, he turns into a zombie and starts running toward the group. The katana girl takes a few shots at the big group of zombies but somehow misses all of them – what, is she blind? Then as a last resort, I guess, they finally decide to use the big gun that can blow up zombies like Angry Birds when they hit something. Because I guess THAT wouldn’t have been their FIRST option, would it? Ozombie, you are making my head hurt. I need some Ibuprofen.

Oh no, he's turning into the Lizardman!

This makes katana girl, who was romantically involved with that guy who just died, go and do a bunch of swordplay stunts against a sunny back-drop that makes the scene look like a commercial. I’m expecting the Capri Sun logo to pop up any second:

Then they all go walking up a mountain with music even more over the top than a Lord of the Rings movie. You know, movie, you’re not exactly a stirring serious epic. This music really doesn’t fit.

Katana girl then goes and kills a whole team of drunken stumbling “zombies” (more like rejected “Thriller” dancers, really) to work off her anger while the other two jackasses talk about the TV show “Intervention,” because…well, I have no idea. The movie brilliantly chooses to focus on that instead of the girl with a sword killing a bunch of zombies, because I guess even the filmmakers knew they had no budget for zombie effects and didn’t even bother trying. It still sucks, though, because the dialogue they’re focusing on from the other two guys is about as well written as a kindergartener’s scribbles on the back of a McDonalds napkin while his mother is smoking crack in the bathroom.

And I just love the choreography for these katana scenes! Yeah, lady, keep on swinging it around in circles! That’s good swordsmanship!

Sword fighting is actually easy if you just twirl the blade around like a cheap little baton that a five year old would use!

Oh well, this scene was a bust, but maybe the other characters will have something at least marginally more interesting for us! We see the girl asking this one dude who the lady is whose name he screams in his sleep. He then goes on a long, long, loooooong rambling tangent about how she’s his ex-girlfriend who he still loves because she used to buy him juice boxes when he didn’t have any money because he spent it all on Pokemon stuff. No, seriously, the actual line is “I had a Pokemon problem.” I…really just do not understand this movie. Who cares about this guy’s stupid-ass life story and Pokemon cards? What’s the appeal? This is a ZOMBIE MOVIE set in the MIDDLE EAST, which could actually be pretty cool, and what are we focusing on? Some stupid shmuck and his stupid ex girlfriend and his stupid Pokemon problems. THAT IS SHIT.

And he just keeps on going, too! It’s probably the longest dialogue in the whole movie, even! It’d be one thing if this was supposed to be some kind of really campy, silly flick, but the silliest it gets is the Osama Bin Laden as a zombie angle, the rest of the movie is a pretty normal zombie movie, so dialogue this absurd and ridiculous is just unredeemable. Go back to the drawing board movie, you failed completely!

You are a LOSER!

So if you actually kept watching after that, we get some more silly fights with the very unconvincing zombies. These guys look more like extras in a Rob Zombie video. Then they run into the girl’s brother, who has a truck they can use, so of course they do only for one guy to constantly patronize and make fun of the brother for trying to kill Bin Laden. They’re on the same side, AND he has a vehicle to get them places faster, but apparently that isn’t good enough for the Idiot Special Forces team! They’re the team with the highest standards.

They reach the Taliban stronghold and, imagine this: they look for Osama Bin Laden in a cave! Pretty weird, huh?!

But unfortunately all they find is a bunch of Taliban guys making a video to tell the United States that Bin Laden is still alive. The brother guy and Mr. Shirtless Man try to stop them, but somehow they get ambushed by zombies instead, saving the two heroes the trouble. Outside, the team’s resident Che Guevara lookalike gets killed and makes a stupid joke right with his last few breaths on Earth – it’s the Ozombie formula, every bit of dialogue HAS to be completely putrid and stale attempts at humor. Otherwise how would we be endeared to the characters?!? Ugh.

Inside, the brother is fighting off the zombies and comes face to face with Bin Laden himself, you know, the guy on the cover! Funny that he hasn’t been in the movie for more than four combined minutes until now! Tell me this doesn’t look like a godawful Halloween mask:

Ah R.L. Stine would be proud.

Then outside some planes come and firebomb the whole place! Look at these special effects. Don’t they just look like they were made in five minutes in Photoshop? You could get better effects from video games.

I didn't know the US military had resorted to firing green jello at its enemies...

OK, 80s video games even!

And miraculously, the only survivors are our main heroes, who make it out without a scratch on them or even any kind of damage to their clothes. And what’s more, the brother makes it out okay too, even though he had the added peril of almost being buried under rubble after the bombs. No explanation, no nothing, just pure stupidity. Hooray for Ozombie!

Uh, yeah, planes don't fly that close to the ground, unless we're supposed to take it that the perspective on that shot is from REALLY far away, which I don't think it is...yeah, just one final slap in the face to logic, I suppose. God this movie sucks.

What am I even supposed to say about this one? It’s so bad it makes other bad movies look pretty mild in comparison. This is the kind of bad movie that will be talked about in legends, in hushed, reverent whispers, like Troll 2 or The Room. Everything about it is uniquely and specially horrendous, covering almost every possible aspect of filmmaking you can think of. But hey, it did give us a shocking insight into what’s really going on in the Middle East! We can’t trust the government to tell us the truth, but we can trust horrible zombie movies to tell us that the Taliban are creating zombies over there to wipe out our special forces! Now we know the truth.

And with this information I will----

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This review has been detained by the United States Government due to too much information given. Forget what you've read here.

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