Silent Zone Stumbles

1 star

A deadly virus is released in the world, decimating the population and turning the reincarnated into mindless, flesh-eating zombies. A few misfit survivors band together to fight back and rebuild society once the zombies are at bay.

It’s a familiar outline that genre fans can easily use to size up just about every zombie movie released in the past few decades. The good ones use those bare bones to flesh out exciting stories and push the boundaries. The bad ones barely connect the dots. The mediocre ones, and there seem to be more of these than the good or the bad, follow the formula without ever leaving anything memorable behind.

Silent Zone is one of those mediocre movies. Directed by Peter Deak, it follows survivors Cassius and Abigail (Matt Devere and Luca Papp) on their journey across a post-apocalyptic America, looking for a haven of likewise uninfected people. They pick up a couple of stragglers along the way, as well as the attention of a group of undead determined to eat them before they gain safety.

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Any undead film fan can name a dozen movies with the same story. To separate his film from the pack, Deak needed to add some visual flair, some unexpected angle to the story, or at least a whole lot of gore. Silent Zone has none of that; it doesn’t even really explain what the title of the movie means regarding the title. The zombies are particularly disappointing, looking more like greasy car mechanics at the end of a hard day than rotting corpses. They move faster than your classic stumbling zombie, and communicate with each other at least enough to follow the leader. But none of that makes them any more interesting to watch. The fights between the living and the dead are bloodless and dull.

In what feels like a last-minute attempt to make the movie ‘different’, or at least interesting, the director, working from the script by Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés, drops a mad scientist named Norton (Alexis Latham) into the mix, giving him a cheesy arm band that he uses to control the undead to do his bidding. It’s a distraction, but not much else.