A group of five teens in the wilderness stumbling upon a mad Russian scientist seeking revenge on the world by turning people into cannibalistic zombies with a rage virus spread by mutated man-eating vultures? Ho hum. But the fact that three of the five are black? Wow! (One gal, Rachel Scheer, is a bit ambiguous racially, but since she has kind of a Journee Smollett thing going, I’m gonna guess there’s black in there somewhere.)
Three out of five — the odds of survival are pretty good, right? Um, no. At least not when the lone white gal — Erin Brown AKA erotic horror icon Misty Mundae — is the only actor of the group who’s famous enough to get billing on the DVD cover. And if she’s surviving, chances are she’ll be the so-called “final girl,” thus implying that all others shall be banished to die. And so it is.
Scheer plays bisexual hobag Olivia, who keeps trying to mack on Kat’s (Brown) boyfriend Josh (Ryan Hooks). Even though Kat had a three-way the previous night with Olivia and Josh, we’re supposed to believe that she’s actually a good, chaste girl who only got freaky because Olivia gave her some tainted Ecstasy. The other two black folks are Pris (Sean Serino) and Jay (Anthony Clark), the typical horror movie “black guy” and “black gal” who have no real personality or identifiable features other than race.
That said, they’re not much different from any of the other thinly drawn characters in this all-splatter, no substance film. Not that I’m expecting Syriana or anything, but scene after scene of gore for gore’s sake becomes tiresome — particularly when the acting is straight out of a 2 AM Skinemax flick (minus the skin). Of course, when you look at the behind-the-scenes footage on the DVD and hear director Robert Kurtzman say that the film’s genesis was the desire to create a movie with zombie vultures, then the end result isn’t too surprising.
