DVD Review – Eaters: Rise Of The Dead

1st September 2011

Dir: Luca Boni & Marco Ristori

Scr: Germano Tarricone & Marco Ristori

Starring: Guglielmo Favilla, Ricardo Floris, Rosella Elmi

Italy, 2010, 90 mins

If there was one thing that filled my trousers with unrelenting dread before I even put Eaters in my DVD player it was the threat sprawled across the cover. ‘Presented by Uwe Boll’.

Some find a space in their hearts for the nutty professor. The gusto with which he delves into each exciting new attempt to shit all over cinema whilst simultaneously kicking over a puppy’s birthday cake and sticking two fingers up to your mum is something that has to marvelled at. If you enjoy his work Godspeed, I for one find most of his films guilty of being just… plain… boring. Anyway this mini-rant is pretty much a moot point as the good doctor fortunately had no hand in the production of the film. I just felt you should no where we’re coming from since it’s felt to be a selling point to have his name adorn the case.

Eaters (for some reason it’s subtitled ‘Rise of the Dead’ for the UK crowd to sound just that little bit more generic for us brits) comes from the capital of rough and ready zombie horror – Italy. A fine tradition they have too, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Creeping Flesh and Zombie Lake to name some of juicer choices. Whereas those films dealt with zombies in a more niche environment, hanging round jungles or zombie lakes for instance, Eaters goes for the full blown post-apocalyptic approach. Personally I’ve always found the aftermath zombie films that slightly more creepy. The off screen violence and empty streets is always a much more profound image than seeing some bucktoothed old woman sink her teeth into some poor bastard.

Our heroes for the journey are Igor and Alen who essentially drive around shooting as many of the undead as they can whilst taking care of scientist Gyno who is using his microscopes to find a reason for all this. How it all started you see – I’m not giving anything away here, it’s the plot – is that a bloody lunatic know as THE PLAGUE SPREADER who… spreads a plague that makes women infertile and then kills them. They then of course come back as the undead and you see where it goes from there. If would be so easy (and fun) to suggest that the filmmakers are making a point that womankind will be the downfall of existence. Pah! Over my bloated, curry chomping, Chelsea loving body. You’d have to pry the can of Carling from my cold dead hand before that could happen. But yes the world is infected by plague, through flashbacks we see that Alen’s partner Alexis was working on an antidote with Gyno and therefore is the only surviving woman making her ever so important.

The gore is heavy and very well done for a film with a total budget of $100,000. A few inventive deaths keep things interesting. Igor and Allen are surprisingly likeable characters so far as you actually give a shit about what happens to them, often with low budget horror I find myself blankly staring at the just wishing that everyone would shut up and die already. Igor particularly is a man who could carry his own film. He loves booze, women and killing things – basically Woodie Harrelson in Zombieland but with a beard!

Although it drags in some places and gets a little too bogged down in an attempt at melodrama Eaters holds up quite well overall. There’s little in the way of scares or creepiness but the film carries itself with an quirky, humorous twinge coupled with some moments of well done blood and mayhem. One to pick up when it costs £4 at your local DVD emporium.

Eaters: Rise of the Dead *** stars

Facebook

Google

Twitter

We hope you're enjoying BRWC. You should check us out on our social channels, subscribe to our newsletter, and tell your friends. BRWC is short for battleroyalewithcheese.