This movie screams of low budget. It's not just the setting - which is a slum in England. The caliber of acting, the costumes, and even the haircuts and makeup all conspired to give this movie the look and feel of a pretty terrible film student project. So, you might think this movie was just as bad as first glance would convince you.
Roxanne Pallett plays a girl who is thrown out of her house by her alcoholic mother and gets a room in this crappy multi-story apartment complex. She starts to make new friends of people who are either aggressively mean or even more aggressively friendly. One of the miscreants she befriends is played by Jason Mewes, the guy who plays the Jay part of Jay and Silent Bob. He's a sketchy dude who doesn't even try to have a British accent, and I am happy he didn't try.
This movie is a LOT of setup. We're over halfway through the movie before (setting up characters, establishing relationships, and noticing strange things) something actually starts to happen. What happens? Murder most foul. What follows? A whodunnit? Not really. It then becomes a zombie survival movie.
The acting wasn't universally terrible, but it was pretty bad. It isn't helped by the lighting, cinematography, or the editing. The story is a decent take on a lot of older premises, but at least it's trying, and that is really the reason to watch this movie at all - everyone appears to be trying really hard to do something they love to do and to entertain the people watching. It's this aspect that is probably most indicative of a student project. No, they don't have the best equipment, and no, they don't really seem to know what they are doing very well, but they are giving it their all.
To that end, the effects guys really tried hard and it shows - the effects are cheap and simple, but they work pretty well throughout the movie. The director had a vision for this movie, but you can only do so much with what you have, so he put out the best he could. And the movie isn't terrible. Yes, I'm going to end this review with a list of things that sucked, and the actual list is longer than I'm going to give an opinion on here, but the movie has a spark of life that I wish I would see in some of the big budget films where actors phoned in their parts and directors just churned out the same stuff everyone does.
Acting was mixed
Effects were good
Story was weak
Dialog was pretty terrible
Editing was shockingly bad
Bottom Line: If you want to watch an entertaining but crappy movie, this should be on that list.
2.0/5