AnythingHorror Central

Oh this one hurts to review!!  I had such high hopes but was ultimately let down.  Hard.  This one has all the ingredients to be a really kick ass zombie flick but ultimately falls a part in its execution.

For those of you not familiar with Autumn, this is a series of books written by David Moody.  The first book, not surprisingly titled Autumn, was published by Moody for free on-line.  It gathered such a following and picked up so much steam that Moody eventually got a publishing deal.  Now he has a movie deal and I wish Moody could have picked the directed for his first novel.  The free on-line Autumn was such a huge hit that Moody wrote a bunch of sequels (Autumn: The City, Autumn: Purification, Autumn: The Human Condition, and Autumn: Disintergration).  Eventually Thomas Dunne Books (a division of St. Martin’s Press) acquired the entire Autumn series and Moody removed them from the internet as free downloads.  I really respect Moody for the path he took and only hope he is reaping the rewards of all his writings (he also wrote Hater in 2006 which is currently in production with Guillermo del Toro producing).

So what happened with the translation from book to screen with Autumn?  Well I must, in full disclosure, admit that I haven’t yet read any of Moody’s books.  I was looking for them online at amazon.com a while back and found them to be a little outside my budget.  For example, Autumn: The City goes for $59.99 on amazon and Autumn: The Human Condition, the last of the series, goes for $548.21!!!  For that price Moody better come to my house and read that fucker to me every night.  So I won’t be comparing the novel to the movie.

Characters trying to figure out if they're in a dream sequence or not!!

The film opens up pretty damn strong.  A virus, which is never explained, comes outta nowhere and kills billions of people within a few hours.  We join a group of survivors as they try and figure out what the hell just happened and as they try and come up with a plan of what to do next.  Three of them decide to go off and separate themselves from the others.  Michael (Dexter Fletcher), Emma (Lana Kamenov), and Carl (Dickon Tolson) seem to have a pretty good plan until a wrench is thrown into the works.  A few days after the virus swept through and killed 99% of the world’s population, the dead corpses start to come back alive.  At first the corpses are blind, deaf, and barely have any motor control (they can hardly move).  But as the days and weeks pass by it seems the reanimated dead are regaining all their faculties little by little until they become a “huge threat” (more on this later) to the remaining survivors.  Eventually the dead are attracted to colors and sounds and can run pretty goddamn fast.  So our survivors come up with a new plan against the newly risen dead:  They are gonna keep quiet and make no noise at all.

Behind the scenes with some "zombie".

Damn good story, isn’t it!!  It’s original and in the right hands could have really been an effective movie.  But what we get here is a very slow and lumbering film that prefers to have the three survivors engaged in endless conversations about their plight instead of moving the story along through action.  That’s my main criticism here:  Director Steven Rumbelow (who also wrote the screenplay from Moody’s novel) wasn’t the right person for this project.  I love the idea that at first the reanimated bodies (the “z” word is never used here) aren’t a threat at all to the survivors, but the problem with this is that there’s no conflict.  The survivors pretty much get along with each other and the dead are, at first, lumbering around ignoring the humans.  There just wasn’t enough to grab you into the story after the initial virus swept across the world.  This could have been an excellent opportunity to explore the main characters but we really never get to know them other than in a superficial way.

Nice scenery can't even help this mess.

And the “zombies” are … well they’re pretty disappointing.  Their make-up was pretty bad; some looked like they were wearing white pancake makeup with raspberry jam around the mouth while others looked like a first time f/x guy’s attempt at using spirit gum and latex.  And while I was clear about how the dead were slowly regaining their faculties and becoming more and more of a threat, I was never really certain as to HOW MUCH of a threat they were supposed to be.  In one scene towards the end, the dead (who at this time could see, hear, and were basically hunting down humans) had surrounded the farmhouse our three survivors were in.  Then one of the survivors just opens the front door, runs right into the thick of them, and escapes.  It just wasn’t ever clear whether the “zombies” were there to eat us or just there as pains in the asses.

David Carradine and his "mother".

There’s also a lot of very long shots that don’t mean anything to the film; random shots of scenery that’ll have you scratching your head as to why it’s even included; dream sequences which we’re never told are “dream sequences” and just pop up and then fade away; and secondary characters who are introduced and then quickly forgotten.  Yeah people, this one’s a mess.  David Carradine pops up in the last 25 odd minutes in a really wasted role.  It felt like the script was already written and then Carradine agreed to be in it so they quickly wrote a part for him.  And the 110 minute run time didn’t help.  If they would’ve edited out all the superfluous shots and retarded secondary characters that contributed nothing to the film, Rumbelow would have probably had a solid 80 minutes film on his hands … and that would’ve been enough for me.

Author David Moody as a "zombie".

Like I write above, its a shame this one went down like it did.  Autumn has a really fresh and original approach to the zombie genre (although they are never called “zombies”) and could have been a sight for sore eyes in a current field of shitty remakes and horrible rehashes.  But due to poor execution and “loose editing” I’m gonna have to say “pass” on Autumn.

My Summary:

Director:  Steven Rumbelow

Plot:  2.5 out of 5 stars

Gore:  1 out of 10 skulls

Zombie Mayhem:  2 out of 5 brains

Reviewed by Scott Shoyer