Ruptured Review: Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead

Country of origin- Australia 
Year of release- 2015 (UK)  
Director- Kiah Roache-Turner   
Stars- Jay Gallagher, Bianca Brodly, Leon Burchill, Luke McKenzie

Because this film is still fairly new, and subsequently most people won’t have had a chance to have seen it yet, I will throughout this review be keeping the plot description to a bare minimum in order to prevent any spoilers.

The film focuses on a mechanic called Barry who finds himself struggling to survive after a meteor shower leave’s most of the population as deranged flesh hungry zombies. After Barry attempts to escape his suddenly besieged home with his wife and young daughter, which ends in tragedy, Barry eventually teams up with three other survivors in an attempt to find his sister Brook and save her from the ever growing zombie horde. However the group realise that getting to her isn’t going to be as easy as they once thought, as it seems that the same meteor shower that caused the zombie outbreak has also somehow neutralised all flammable liquids such as petrol, thus leaving them with no way to power their pickup truck. But Barry eventually realises that both the blood of the zombies and the strange gas that they exhale is very flammable and can be used to power now armoured pickup truck and take the group to safety and his sister.

Considering this film took four years to make and was shot entirely on weekends so as not to interrupt the work schedules of the cast and crew, and was crafted with a fairly modest budget, this film is astonishingly well made. Everything from the stunning cinematography of Tim Nagle, to the surprisingly good quality acting of almost the entire cast felt like something from a far higher budget feature. But the success of this film can be put down to three main components.

Firstly, the filmmakers took the time to actually create characters that you didn’t wish a horrible death upon within five minutes, and unlike most modern zombie films the characters were given interesting and at times tragic backstories that made the audience actually give a damn about them. Secondly, the filmmakers got a perfect blend of over the top gore and comedic writing that gave the film a fresh and constantly vibrant feel that is so rarely seen in the horror genre today. And finally, possibly the most important component this film contains is that the people who made it actually gave a shit. So often we are bludgeoned half to death with horror films that were made for one reason alone, to make money, this is thankfully not one of them. The filmmakers behind Wyrmwood display genuine passion for the genre and the film is littered with clever references to films such as Evil Dead, Braindead and Mad Max that show real understanding of this films origins.

To say that I recommend this film doesn’t really do it justice, for fans of zombie action cinema this is a must and it will not disappoint those with a keen eye for the genre, it gets 8/10 from me.