Zombie Under Siege can be found on IMDB as Navy Seals vs. Zombies. It follows a team of elite Navy SEALs sent into New Orleans, which has become the site of a major zombie outbreak. The SEALs are to rescue the vice president, who was in the city at the time of the outbreak. Along the way, they also discover that there is a secret CIA laboratory housing scientists who might be vital to finding a remedy for this zombie plague. And so these SEALs fight through hordes of the undead, just trying to complete their mission.
The film is the kind of direct-to-video dreck that really shouldn’t be in our cinemas. But here we are. The film gets practically everything wrong. First of all, the actors that they cast don’t really look like the elite fighting machines that the Navy SEALs really ought to be. They all look a little out of shape. But the film doesn’t really seem to care about verisimilitude on that level. It doesn’t really seem to have bothered to do any research about how these teams operate, or how they might have even talk to each other. Every bit of military-style dialogue in this movie comes off as really fake.
Once we get on the ground, the action is sparse and uninteresting. Zombie movies tend to work on scale. A zombie on its own is never a really scary thing. It is the idea of the horde that gives this genre its cinematic juice. But the film never really makes it feel like these SEALs are horribly outnumbered. They are, after all, armed to the gills, and the screen just never fills with threats to a sufficient degree where it feels like they might actually be in real danger.
All that, and the story doesn’t really make any sense. A tacked on epilogue pretty much undoes everything that the film establishes. It doesn’t really matter what these heroes were doing on the streets of New Orleans. I don’t want to give everything away, but the film suggests that they weren’t in any real danger. The film resolves the larger problem of the zombie outbreak through a twist that involves no effort at all from the protagonists. They do not earn their survival. It seems to have come tacit through the sheer laziness of the screenwriting.
Through it all, it’s just difficult to care. None of these characters are memorable. It’s actually tough to tell them apart at certain points, which really makes it difficult for any scene to generate drama. One of them might make a noble sacrifice, but it’s tough to feel anything for that deed. But this can only be partly blamed on the writing. Bad acting also contributes much to this effect. The nominal lead, Ed Quinn, is about as interesting as a tub of cottage cheese.
Zombie Under Siege is a bad film all the way through. It takes a simple premise that has the potential for solid action and then proceeds to bore for an hour straight. And then it gets to the epilogue, but the film somehow manages to find new depths of awfulness. It makes everything that went on before it even weaker, the final big twist rendering all these efforts meaningless. In a week of too many movies having to share too few screens, it feels almost offensive that a movie this bad has to be around.
My Rating:
