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Sharon (Yvette Yzon) is the only survivor of an island overrun by
zombies. Since that incident, Tyler Inc. has gotten hold of the zombie
virus and has transferred it to one of their labs on another island.
Eventually though, contact with that island broke off, and now Tyler Inc.
sends the marines in, along with their head scientist Barker (Paul Holme),
and with Sharon, the only one who has come face to face with zombies and
survived. Of course, once on the island, our heroes find everyone dead,
and before long, the zombies kill their way through most of the marines as
well, until only Sharon, Barker and a handful of soldiers are left, and
they lock themselves in inside the lab - where Barker starts conducting
experiments, and it soon becomes clear that he is not willing to give up
on the zombies quite yet. When Sharon gives him a pice of her mind, he
locks her in with a handful of zombies hoping that everything will sort
itself out ... but Sharon survives. Barker himself has less luck when
coming face to face with a zombie, and soon the other soldiers die as
well. As the only survivor, Sharon knows she must do her best to end the
zombie plague once and for all, and eventually, she reaches a zombie
breeding station controlled by a telepathic brain, and manages to blow up
the place. Still, that doesn't kill all of the zombies, but when all seems
to be lost, a submarine shows up to pick Sharon up and get her to safety. Italian
zombie films are hardly ever terribly innovative, but this one is pretty
much an undisguised (yet unofficial of course) remake of James Cameron's Aliens,
with zombies filling in for extraterrestrials (not too much of a stretch,
if you thing about it), and outer space replaced with an island in the
Pacific. Ironically, director Bruno Mattei has (unofficially) remade Aliens
once before with 1990's Terminator II/Shocking Dark. This
actually says rather little about the quality of the film at hand though -
and you know what, for forgettable and derivative zombie trash, Zombies:
The Beginning is not that bad at all, it's competently directed at
least, its low budget doesn't show too much, Yvette Yzon certainly makes
up for one of the better heroines Mattei had in his films over the years,
and for a change, Mattei refrains from killing off likeable characters at
random points just for maximal shock effects, which makes this film almost
coherent, narratively. All that said, one can't help but also state
there are waya funnier zombie movies out there (if unintentionally so),
and Mattei has made way funnier movies (again, unintentionally so), and
even if this is one of his better films concerning the pure craft of
filmmaking, it's by no means an important genre entry. STill, you might be
mildly entertained. By the way, a direct sequel to Bruno
Mattei's Island of the
Living Dead from a year earlier - but you don't have to have seen
that movie to understand this one.
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