Review: State of Emergency (2011)

Since the Venture Bros. has left us for god knows how long, I decided to get back to watching some horror flicks for another week or two.  This time around, a very forgettable zombie flick entitled State of Emergency.  This movie, while it does contain the occasional zombie, seems to focus more on the trials of the people surviving the outbreak rather than zombie-killing.  The end result is like taking the slowest episode you can think of from The Walking Dead and then padding it out with an extra hour of even slower footage.

The story begins, sort of, with an explosion at a chemical plant.  The chemicals, naturally, turn people into zombies.  Some are immune to the air-born virus and these are the survivors.  We begin with Jim, as he loses his wife to some accident we are unaware of.  In fact, for the first thirty minutes I wouldn’t have even known this was a zombie film if I hadn’t read the synopsis.  It’s just Jim puttering around in a building collecting supplies and being wary of something… something off-camera that we don’t know about but he seems to.

After that, he discovers a few survivors nearby in a warehouse.  He makes his way over there and joins up with them.  The movie then goes from current times to flashbacks in a manner that seems as if they edited the film randomly.  We do finally figure out what happened, albeit by this point we almost don’t care.

The survivors have to stay safe from the zombies and deal with a few personal issues and there are at least a few fight scenes.  The fights, though few and far between, are one of the film’s highlights, being gritty and dangerous and realistic.  It’s not an easy ride to kill the bad guys and the zombies are the fast version, so running away casually is not an option.  Eventually, the armed forces show up and rescue everyone.  Film over.

While there are a few individual scenes that stand out, the presence of some atrocious acting and the complete lack of a direction make this film a good cure for insomnia.  I can appreciate the minimalist approach to a zombie outbreak, but do we really need every scene to stretch and stretch?  In the end, I could have probably saved myself an hour-and-a-half of my life by avoiding this one.  Amusingly enough, there are no critical reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but the audience rating of 28% is pretty much spot-on.  If you’re a diehard zombie fan, you might give it a try.  Just don’t expect to be blown away.  

Photo Credits -           

State of Emergency poster courtesy of thezombiemob.com