899. Osombie (2012)

Starring: Eve Mauro, Corey Sevier, Jasen Wade

Director: John Lyde

Running Time: 93 mins

Osombie is an American film about a troop of US soldiers in Afghanistan who find themselves stuck in the middle of a Al-Qaeda zombie apocalypse led by Osama Bin Laden, back from the grave to wreak havoc on the world once again.

Right, this could have been worse than expected. In fact, when you consider that its premise revolves around a zombie Bin Laden, it’s a pretty stunning film, but that’s not saying much. The production values and visual effects are fairly decent for a low-budget film like this, and the actors aren’t that bad, but it suffers from one of the most tedious stories I’ve ever sat through that just doesn’t live up to its wacky premise.

Basically, the only reason you would watch this film would be the hope of seeing a zombie Bin Laden get his head shot off, as well as the violence and gore of many other zombie deaths, and whilst this film does have that, I would say that it all accounts for about 15-20% of the 90 minute runtime.

There are zombies everywhere in this film, but there’s never a sense of peril or danger whenever they appear on screen, because they’re walking so slowly and the characters always shoot them dead with next to no effort (they’re often just chatting away while randomly shooting zombies around them, so it’s not really that exciting).

Instead of a crazy, zombie action-horror, you get this really boring film about the lives of these couple of people stuck in Afghanistan. For starters, the writing is so appalling that you’re never interested in what these people have to say, you just want to see them in big fights with zombies, but you have to sit through conversation after conversation of just absolute tedium for the majority of the film, when all that’s really needed to make a fun/funny film is people blowing zombies’ heads off!

That’s the other problem with this film: it’s not funny-bad, it’s just boring. As I’ve said, the story is dull as anything, but the production values, which are fine, are too good for this to be a so-bad-it’s-good sort of a film; the make-up on the zombies is pretty decent, the CGI is fine, and the acting is good too, so there’s nothing here for you to laugh at like you would in most Z-list movies.

What’s worse and more boring about this is that it’s not distasteful enough. It’s a pretty sensitive idea to have a film about Osama Bin Laden coming back from the dead (only one year after he was killed), but this film has so little sight of Bin Laden himself that it might as well just be a normal zombie film; it’s not controversial or moronic enough to be funny or interesting, and all you end up with is a dull, slow-moving story about people you don’t care about with little in the way of seeing any of Osombie, so that’s why this gets a 3.3 from me.