Zombie With a Shotgun is a firm favorite amongst genre fans. This article will serve as a review of the film (which you can watch on TubiTV for free) as well as enable those who already love it to fund its next venture. Zombie With a Shotgun wants to give you a video game. The team behind the new game wants some funding via Indigogo just as they have done for all their previous successes. They released a web series, a comic book, and a full-length film so they’d be crazy not to keep going.
Zombie With a Shotgun Video Game on Indigogo
The creator and producer of the new zombie video game are Hilton Ariel Ruiz. Designer and Art from Fredrik “Fedde” Mattsson. Designing and programming from Jimmy Brunnberg. All the usual perks apply for donations to the cause starting with an easy $15. The starting perk on Indigogo gets you your very own copy of the Zombie With a Shotgun game and it only gets better from there. The team has put together ten levels of zombie madness and the gameplay itself promises special features like petting and rescuing rabbits as you shoot your way through the story.
Support the Cause on Indigogo
Zombie With a Shotgun needs your help to fund its video game dream.
Or just watch the movie and settle in.
Zombie With a Shotgun Story
If you’ve never seen the movie, this zombie action story is not well-rated. Zombie With a Shotgun holds a 3.6 from a meager 136 people on IMDb.com. The film was released to Amazon Prime which is where I ended up watching it. The web series was spawned from consisted of 5 episodes and was relatively popular. The story follows Aaron and Rachel who are on the run. It seems Aaron, already infected with the virus has not turned into the full zombie he should be. Instead, as half-zombie, half-human Aaron has leveled up. He can talk to zombies for starters and finds he has more abilities that are handy in a zombie apocalypse.
Zombie With a Shotgun Review
Firstly, I can see what this film intended to be. Knowing that the story was born of a comic book, it’s easy to see that the layout and scene-setting are very much the heart of where this movie stems from. Overall though, it feels unfinished. I liked the story, the characters, and the gist of its apocalyptic world roots. There is an infection, government conspiracies about world domination, a love triangle, and mystical powers. All the ingredients are within the confines of this 79-minute film. It’s hard to talk trash about independent movies made with low budgets but thrown into the pool of stuff to spend time on, it’s also hard not to break it down.
Zombie With a Shotgun is a great idea executed within the means available to the creators. Performances are mostly better than some B-movies with more money to toss around. The two lead characters Aaron (Braeden Baade) and Rachel (Kathryn Kuhn) are the best on offer. Unfortunately, it’s the dialogue and scripting that ultimately hurt the pacing of this zombie movie. A lot of the conversations seem ripped straight from the speech bubble confines of their paper version.
Cop 1 “These orders coming in. We not allowed to take down anyone who’s infected?”
Cop 2 ” Listen, be careful. Right now they look infected or not, we gotta take them down.”
Zombie With a Shotgun 2019 quote
Comic Book VS Film
Similar to reading a comic book, characters don’t get fleshed out well enough to translate to the screen. It still feels like bite-sized components in a sequence of events instead of a proper film that gives you a whole piece of the idea. In the final act, there is even a scene that plays out as a comic book. I wondered if this was where the funds ran out and were added to finish the film. Mind you, this scene made me want to find the original Zombie With a Shotgun comic book. The violence and gore added to this one final piece were more than the rest of the film had in its entirety.
The cinematography is on the amateur side, sometimes showing on-set curtains that would have been better left out. There are a lot of flashback points marked by a hazy white vignette. But at the same time, I can see where the idea for a video game may have come from. Perhaps Zombie With a Shotgun’s creators always had this idea in the backs of their minds or perhaps someone offered the idea up after seeing the film. There are some really cool overhead aerial shots of a decaying city and the set pieces throughout are atmospheric interludes where you can imagine it being the introduction to the next level of gameplay.
Risk-Taking Indie Movies
Zombie With a Shotgun allows for some risk-taking. The story does include some boundary-pushing even if it’s mostly through its numerous sex scenes. For me, this came back to the lack of solid characters. Instead of utilizing scripting to tell the audience how close people are, it chooses well-intentioned albeit sometimes inappropriate sex scenes.
In one example our two main casts, Aaron and Rachel, get it on in the back of her car while on the run. I’m not a fan of emotional diatribes during times of intense action and here, Aaron is very ill. He is lethargic, has veins beginning to spiral across his face, and sweats a lot. Both are rather rigid signs of not being in the mood.
Effects are utilized well between prosthetics, practical effects, and makeup. Common sense prevails in Zombie With a Shotgun whereas other movies in this arena clearly fail. Restraint is used, and instead of applying over-the-top blood and spatter, filmmakers erred on the side of caution with results that suited the film’s overall look and feel.
I didn’t mind Zombie With a Shotgun. It’s got some very likable qualities.
I give Zombie With a Shotgun
2 out of 5
- Apocalyptic zombie world cinema La Horde / Zombieland 2 / Brain Freeze
- Netflix Zombies: #Alive / Army of the Dead
- Watch for free: David Black Klink Klonk Klunk & Never Be Done double review.
