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| Courtesy of MVD Visual |
After the reemergence of George Miller with his fourth
long-awaited entry to the Mad Max film franchise Mad Max: Fury Road in
2015, from all around the world we saw a slew of like-minded if not outright
copycat films inspired by Miller’s post-apocalyptic science-fiction universe. Though the Mad Max films from the
1980s generated their own bevy of cheap knockoffs (some better than others),
the trend went away for awhile until Fury Road reignited the trend.
Right around the time of Fury Road,
the AMC Network’s answer to the then-fading zombie outbreak trend The
Walking Dead was peaking in popularity.
Point being is someone in Spain who was making horror films for awhile, Pablo
Parés by name, took notice of the two rising trends and decided to sandwich
them together, resulting in the Spanish Mad Max/Walking Dead crossbreed
I Am Toxic.
From Argentinian company Del Toro Films (not to be confused with director Guillermo) and co-written by Paulo Soria and fellow horror-director Daniel De La Vega, I Am Toxic begins not unlike Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later with a male protagonist wordlessly waking up in a barren postwar ravaged world with no recollection of who he was or how he ended up there.
On his sojourn trying to find
another fellow human, he encounters a group of scavengers who take him prisoner. Among them is a quiet but fierce young woman who
sympathizes with his plight and offers to help him escape. All the while he and she are fending off the
scavengers, they encounter an armada of the undead whose poisonous bites can
infect and transform them into zombies themselves.
Lensed in widescreen in drab, dreary colors and low light levels suggesting the dusty asbestos drenched dirtiness of the world by What the Waters Left Behind cinematographer Facundo Nuble and scored brilliantly by Witch composer Pablo Sala, I Am Toxic is a mostly tightly budgeted action-adventure flick with some pretty grisly moments of violence peppered throughout.
Performance-wise the
ensemble cast is fine with Esteban Prol as the film’s disoriented hero and Fini
Bocchino as the largely silent femme fatale who initially is with the
scavengers but gradually comes to the hero’s aid. Still, one gets the sense watching I Am
Toxic this post-apocalyptic thriller isn’t going to reach the heights
scaled by George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece.
If you ever wondered what George Miller and George A. Romero look like together, I Am Toxic is the one you’ve been waiting for. Otherwise, this zombie outbreak/post-apocalyptic actioner doesn’t quite bring a whole lot of imagination to the table. Though a Land of the Dead zombie army invasion was a fun development, most of this is spent indoors with little to no room for any kind of visual wonderment or awe.
If you ever wondered what George Miller and George A. Romero look like together, I Am Toxic is the one you’ve been waiting for. Otherwise, this zombie outbreak/post-apocalyptic actioner doesn’t quite bring a whole lot of imagination to the table. Though a Land of the Dead zombie army invasion was a fun development, most of this is spent indoors with little to no room for any kind of visual wonderment or awe.
Despite some good zombie gore effects and a unique mixture of kindred world-ending
movie elements, I Am Toxic for most people accustomed to the splendor of
George Miller will likely come away underwhelmed. For myself it was a fine way to kill two
hours but in the scheme of things, official and unofficial Mad Max movies
with zombies thrown into the mix, it’s easy for this to go in one ear and out
the other.
--Andrew Kotwicki
