After getting a good response from the audience with the short film Anger of the Dead (freely usable on YouTube), Italian director Francesco Picone has once again demonstrated his passion for zombie movies with this feature film of the same name, translated, however, in Italy under the title Apocalypse Zero.
The Italian filmography on the living dead has gained new vigor in recent years thanks to the works of Luca Boni and Marco Ristori (Eaters, Zombie Massacre), who also continue to engage in the strand with Apocalypse Zero, which they produced together with director Uwe Boll.
The trademark of this film, unfortunately, is blatant enough to recall the aforementioned works of the Italian directorial duo. Similarly, Apocalypse Zero chases after all the clichés of U.S. hits of recent years, without adding anything new to them.
Written on a subject by Picone himself, the feature film Anger of the Dead brings to the screen the desperation of Alice, a pregnant woman forced to ensure the life of her future unborn child albeit in a world plagued by the living dead, where the survivors themselves have now become a danger, perhaps even worse than the plague.
Shot in the English language, Apocalypse Zero casts itself toward the lands overseas, from which it steals handily and haphazardly whatever incipit may come in handy, thus proving to be more an honest exercise in style than a film dedicated to an intelligent audience.
Picone's direction (lacking any style of its own) somehow manages to save the work, although the very script, again with the same signature, decrees its resounding failure. The dialogues of its characters are poor and uninteresting and are even more diminished by poor dubbing. Alice herself seems to be dubbed by a cartoon character. The main character in particular becomes the least successful because of a shaky script. Although Roberta Sparta does her job decently, her character, on the other hand, is limp and not very believable. Her characterization is unfortunately average among the characters in Apocalypse Zero, except for the interesting acting performance of Desirée Giorgetti who once again, after her performance in Morituris (by Raffaele Picchio, among others involved in this project) demonstrates with the utmost expressiveness that he is able to sew the role of the victim onto himself.
Apocalypse Zero is one of many cookie-cutter zombie films (a branch unfortunately so much in vogue in recent years), which fails to stand out from the average precisely because it diligently follows its stylistic trappings. Indeed, we find in it citations to Dawn of the Living Dead quite explicit but also to many other films (The Walking Dead, Demons 2, Martyrs).
Picone's feature brings to the screens a zombie action rather than a horror film. Its undead are very fast and aggressive and roar, as if they were undead lions instead of dead ones. Likewise, the apocalypse that towers in the title is only a distant perception, eventual fantasy of the viewer who might affix it to the vision. The suspense is totally razed to make way for a TV picture worthy of an anonymous series. Both the acting and the music amplify this feeling, then relegating the film, partly because of the paucity of its story, to an unappreciative mishmash of already trite situations.
The special effects, by Carlo Diamantini and Tiziano Martella, are in line with what has already been said: effective but they do not excel and still cannot save the film from oblivion.
Bottom line, Apocalypse Zero by Francesco Picone is a low-budget affair that made use of a crew of good tradesmen who were able to lend an aura of honesty to their work but nothing more.
