‘Osombie’ DVD Review
Stars: Corey Sevier, Eve Mauro, Jasen Wade, Danielle Chuchran, William Rubio, Matthew Reese, Andrew Hancock | Written by Kurt Hale | Directed by John Lyde
The official synopsis for Osombie goes something like this: “Dusty, a yoga instructor from Colorado, who is on a desperate rescue mission to save her crazy brother Derek, a conspiracy theorist who is convinced Osama Bin Laden is still alive, despite having been buried at sea. In Afghanistan, Dusty falls in with a team of Nato Special Forces on a secret assignment. Turns out Derek is not so crazy after all, and that Osama has returned from his watery grave and is making an army of zombie terrorists. When the group crashes headlong into the growing zombie apocalypse, Dusty and the troops must find and destroy the root of the zombie insurgency before it infests the rest of the world.” However the film can be summed up more succinctly than that, more along the lines of: NATO Special Forces vs. Jihadist zombies = AWESOME!! You really don’t need to know more than that to enjoy the film…
Osombie is everything I wanted it to be, from the ridiculous turban clad zombies to the frankly hilarious frequency with which star Corey Sevier takes his top off (ladies and gay men are in for a treat I tell you), the film plays it straight down the middle as an army of the undead rise and eat their way across the Utah desert, standing in for an un-named Middle Eastern country. And by play it straight I mean that the script, from Kurt Hale, doesn’t play it for laughs, there’s no irony and there’s certainly no hidden political message – this is as jingoistic as the recent big-budget blockbuster Battleship (oh the illiteration), using the idea of a zombie infestation as a metaphor for the spread of jihadist ideals and the perceived threat from the so-called growing terrorist minority. Although Osombie is actually also one hell of a better movie that that boat flick…
Director John Lyde manages to successfully downplay the exploitation aspects of the film and presents what is, in essence, a war movie on a par with any of Hollywood’s recent output such as Black Hawk Down and Hurt Locker – only with zombies. That’s not to say there is plenty of blood, guts, gore and grue – it flows by the bucketload – but the film feels less like a low-budget zombie horror movie and much more like a traditional war film, right down to the emotive, even heart-wrenching at times, speeches given by the soldiers as they head into “war” with the undead army of Bin Laden.
The cast are uniformally (pardon the pun) excellent, with Danielle Chuchran, fresh from her role in Snow Beast, as the bad-ass only female member of the special forces team who shows she has more balls than her male counterparts, the real standout – although as I mentioned earlier, she does have competition from the naked torso of Corey Sevier!
Despite it’s less than politically-correct subject matter, Osombie remains one of the best low-budget zombie flicks I’ve seen in a very long time. The film hits DVD and Blu-ray on May 14th courtesy of Signature Entertainment.
