So, given that my last couple of reviews have been for rather sub-par movies, I figured it was time to review something that would give me a little less strain on my sanity. So recently I re-watched the 2009 French zombie flick La Horde. Surely this cured my mental woes, right? Let’s discuss.

To begin, the story is incredibly simple. After a fellow cop is killed and dumped in a landfill, four corrupt cops take it upon themselves to get revenge on the criminals responsible, which takes them to a mostly abandoned apartment building. Their plans don’t go quite as expected, and the cops are captured. Unfortunately, around the same time, the dead inexplicably come back to life and immediately start killing the living. So the two groups reluctantly team up in order to escape the building, which is sort of an odd move as we see hundreds of zombies swarming outside.

La Horde is a pretty fun time, but it certainly isn’t without it flaws. I had no particular love for the characters, for example. I felt they were underdeveloped and nobody I could really root for. Sadly, my favorites would have to be the leader of the criminals and the crazy old racist who lived in the building that we are introduced later in the movie. My least favorite is the one female main character in the movie. Not only does she raid an apartment building while pregnant, but she is a stone cold bitch who has no feelings for even her teammates, one of which — if I’m not mistaken — is her brother-in-law. If I was meant to root for her dying, then mission accomplished.

Otherwise, issues arise with things like simple logic. Like in many zombie flicks, once the main characters discover that a head shot will put a zombie down, they continue throughout the movie to pump bullets in their bodies, occasionally remembering to aim for the head. Another thing I noticed was the apparent serious consideration given to raping a zombie right in the middle of things, which is wrong on a few levels. And of course, the zombies are of the fast variety, which some won’t like. And not only are they fast, they all emit some odd screeching sounds that really make no sense to me.

However, all that can be countered with some nice lighting work, decent gore effects, and some amazing, balls-to-the-wall action. A lot of that action, unfortunately, is filmed with a shaky-cam edge for the most part. Two separate fights occur between human and zombies, and even though the idea of fisticuffs with the undead isn’t the brightest of ideas, it’s damn fun for us to watch. There is a scene near the end where one of the cops climbs on top of a car and begins unloading on the zombies with his two handguns, and only with watching the movie a second time did I realize the movies’ poster is inaccurate, as it depicts three people on the car instead of the one. Oh well.

As I said earlier, despite its issues, La Horde is still pretty damn fun.

You’ll probably enjoy it more if you go into it with more of an action mind frame than horror. Even though it has zombies and lots of blood, it seems to lean more towards bursts of all-out chaos and destruction. And you know, sometimes that isn’t so bad. If you haven’t seen it yet, make the time and see for yourself if it’s your cup of tea. In the meantime, rest in peace.

Macabre Rating: 3 out of 5 tombstones