Night of the Mad Max

Film: Wyrmwood
Format: Streaming video from Prime on Fire!

I have said before that the zombie subgenre is pretty packed right now. Unless you make something that is so gonzo and amazing that it can’t be denied (say, Train to Busan), you have to do something else to stand out. Wyrmwood, also called Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, takes this to heart, offering a number of completely new ideas into the zombie world. It’s an inventive screenplay, and because of that, it’s a movie that is hard not to enjoy on some level.

If you aren’t aware right away that this is an Australian film, you’ll be made aware the moment someone speaks. Barry (Jay Gallagher) lives in the outback with his wife Annie (Catherine Terracini) and their daughter Meganne (Megann e West). Barry’s sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) is a photographer working with an assistant and a model when the model suddenly and unexpectedly zombifies, and, biting the assistant, zombifies her. Brooke manages to climb into the rafters of her studio, keeping herself safe. She calls Barry and tells him what has happened, and soon enough, he and his family are being attacked as well.

The sudden appearance of zombies doesn’t make any sense, of course, but we learn eventually that it seems to be connected to the Earth passing through a meteor swarm, a little nod to both Night of the Living Dead and Night of the Comet. During their escape, Meganne removes her gasmask and turns as well, and the same thing happens to Annie, forcing Barry to kill them both with a nail gun, but he runs out of nails before he kills himself.

The movie is going to be split into two stories. First, Barry will fall in with Chalker (Yure Covich), who is accidentally killed by Benny (Leon Burchill). Benny and Barry eventually meet Frank (Keith Agius), his assistant (Cain Thompson). They will discover that fossil fuels are now inert, but the zombies’ breath and blood can be ignited. The other story concerns Brooke, who has been first rescued and then kidnapped by a paramilitary group. She and a group of zombies are then experimented on—she appears to be immune to whatever is turning people into zombies, and so is injected with zombie blood to see what happens. What actually happens is that she develops the ability to control the zombies mentally.

The other thing we learn is that whatever it is that is causing the zombies does not affect people who are A-negative blood type. They can still be infected with a bite, but they appear to be otherwise immune to whatever airborne element is turning people into zombies.

Most movies struggle to come up with a single original idea, and Wyrmwood has a bunch. They have a zombie plague that doesn’t affect people of a particular blood type, flammable zombie blood and breath that can be harnessed to run cars and other normally gas-powered engines, and the idea that someone can control the zombie horde with her mind. It’s a lot of inventiveness packed into about 100 minutes.

Eventually, of course Barry is going to find his sister and all sorts of mayhem will ensue as they are pursued by the military (or at least the para-military) and everything ends in a climactic battle of good and evil.

There’s a lot here that is really fun. For all of the homages to zombie films, this also very much feels like a homage to the Mad Max films, since the characters gear up in leather and something like hockey masks. But it really is a fun thing to see a group of guys not killing zombies but corralling them so they can strap them into a machine to harvest their breath, which keeps their car (and the action) moving forward.

The biggest issue with Wyrmwood is that the attempted humor tends to fall pretty flat. There are a few moments that might elicit a chuckle, but the film isn’t really meant to be funny, so the humor it attempts doesn’t really land. There’s also no real explanation for why the paramilitary group is experimenting on zombies and on Brooke. It feels like something done specifically to make them the bad guys, but there isn’t any real purpose behind it—it’s there because they need someone to be the bad guys.

Still, it was entertaining enough that there’s a part of me that wants to hunt down the sequel, Wyrmwood: Armageddon.

Why to watch Wyrmwood: It tries a lot of new stuff in the zombie subgenre and nails a lot of it.
Why not to watch: The moments of humor don’t really fit.