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| Images courtesy of Cleopatra Entertainment |
You probably don’t know character-actor turned
writer-producer-director-star Kazy Tauginas quite yet despite having seen him
in the first two of The Equalizer films, Dolemite is My Name and
the first John Wick. And that’s
okay as his pairing with co-producer-writer-director Brian Kazmarck resulted in
one of the better microbudget zombie outbreak films as well as Cleopatra
Entertainment releases in a while. Ordinarily
known for things DIY fare like Cocaine Werewolf, Fear Cabin or Silent
Bite, Cleopatra’s acquisition of Kazy Tauginas’ foray in front of and
behind the camera represents surprisingly a stronger effort with an interesting
unconventional approach to the zombie epic despite having zero resources. Initially the cover promises a
tongue-in-cheek romp with a lot of canned over-the-top horror comedy antics
when in actuality it does something kinda neat untested in the genre as far as
jumping about perspectives and storyline.
For a movie that purports to be George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,
conceptually and structurally speaking it was more in line with the director’s next
film Creepshow leaping from episode to episode as the zombie outbreak
unfolds.
Opening amid an ongoing pandemic on a story thread lifted
out of Blair Witch by way of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Tracy
Kovalsky (Courney Cavanagh) and her cameraman go out to make a documentary/hunt
for her missing brother Jordan (Kazy Tauginas) who disappeared following
enrollment into an illicit clinical trial for an unapproved developmental
miracle drug called Dumitor. Trouble is
somewhere along the way, one of the doctors unthinkingly(?) administers
painkillers to a patient thereby mixing with the Dumitor and creating a kind of
rage zombification effect that infects much of the staff and patients. Soon a lockdown is administered followed by a
military cleanup to try and contain the outbreak and cover their tracks. Over time however, what has inadvertently been
unleashed into the isolated testing facility soon balloons into a full-blown
outbreak where fellow humans hunt each other down in self-defense and/or
madness.
In reading this, I know what you’re thinking: old hat been
there done that. And yeah while much of
it is, mixing between standard scope widescreen horror movie and a DIY cinema vérité
documentary style, watching this reminded me of the ingenuity behind, say,
Emily Hagins’ Pathogen which she famously directed only at the age of twelve. For a subgenre that is still beyond the point
of being beaten to death or buried into the ground with oversaturation and
fatigue in a post The Walking Dead Hellscape we’ve condemned ourselves
to, Mirror Life: Modern Zombies for no money and no actors save for Kazy
Tauginas is innovative in how it leaps freely Creepshow or Nightmare City
style from character subplot to character subplot. Sure we’re seeing people we sort of come to care
about die horribly in that Hitchcockian Psycho way with story threads
being interrupted but then it picks up with another nearby character and carries
on to the next thread. It was an
interesting method in unpacking a quickly spreading all-encompassing event.
Released last week on demand and on DVD by Cleopatra
Entertainment featuring a trailer, deleted scenes, outtakes and a commentary
track, Mirror Life: Modern Zombies is a film you must approach by
looking past the poster and premise and take the mixture of regional filmmaking
and Hollywood character acting in as an inspired little world-ending undead
apocalypse thriller. No it isn’t
particularly scary save for some [*REC] styled scares of bloodied
infected characters glaring at the camera before charging it, but nevertheless
this was inventive and consistently surprising for being a no-budget zombie flick
in a vast ocean of them. For what its
worth, this one stands out for taking some creative turns and while one wonders
what this might’ve been had the filmmakers garnered more of a budget than a
dress rehearsal Mirror Life: Modern Zombies finds its energy through its
financial resource setbacks. It’ll
surprise you by how much it does both with so little and with a horror subgenre
that has otherwise absolutely been done to death. A little engine that could.
--Andrew Kotwicki
