Sure, you’ve seen it all before, but if you love zombies and man meat, you can never get enough. But…are these three enough? Let’s find out.
DECADE OF THE DEAD (2023)
This one has a really strong start. It’s ten years after an outbreak. Horror veteran Sean Patrick Thomas and his tiny team of survivors is boating to an island when a small boat of men tries to overtake them. We immediately see that the fight scenes are going to be a highlight.
On the island, the main group teams up with another group of survivors to fend off a wave of running zombies. There are some great, brief but bloody zombie battle moments in this sequence. Awesome.
But don’t get your hopes up. Much like The Walking Dead, this movie isn’t too concerned with the zombies. It’s all about the human-on-human violence.
Surprise, surprise. There’s a death-worshipping cult that wants to take over the world, and it turns out one of our main girls has a connection to someone from that cult.
This becomes more of a religious war story. Yawn. I guess I’m burnt out on zombie flicks with character development and a deeper concept, because I spent the whole movie just waiting for more zombie action, which didn’t come until the last fifteen minutes.
TRANSIT 17 (2019)
I am not going to lie. I knew ahead of time that this movie was bashed on IMDb for having very few zombies. I watched the trailer, and then the hubby and I watched the movie for a very shallow reason; it was an action movie with a muscle hunk. That’s right. We regularly devour pointless action movies if there’s a muscle hunk.
Written and directed by one of its stars, Transit 17 feels like it just meanders in between gun battles and melee fight sequences. There’s been an outbreak. There’s a group that thinks all those that have been infected need to be killed. A resistance group believes they can find a cure and save the infected.
There’s even a dude who uses Star Wars level technology to communicate.
As the resistance sets out on vaguely defined missions, they have an early zombie encounter, and it’s fricking awesome. Had there been more of them, I would have thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but it’s literally the only time there are any zombies.
We also get way too little of the muscle hunk. I thought he was going to be the star based on the trailer, but that isn’t the case.
52 minutes in, we learn that one girl was bit but not affected, and the optimistic group thinks she could be the key to a cure. If protecting her were the focus of the film, it would have been…well…focused. But it’s just not.
ZOMBIECON VOLUME 1 (2025)
This is one of those films that has so many strong individual elements to it, but as a whole it just doesn’t come together, which is made even more glaringly obvious due to a runtime of nearly 2 hours. In that time, the tone shifts (feels like a quirky comedy at times, but becomes quite intense at others), the plot refuses to focus, scenes go on too long, and each segment feels like a standalone sequence more than part of a greater whole aimed at developing a story arc.
We first meet two rival groups of cosplayers. I’m thrilled to say that each one has a hot shirtless guy. landing this movie on the stud stalking page. Each group does a weird performance at the convention, and the main group—you know, the good guys—wins a trophy.
On their way home, they run into a homeless dude in an alley, and he gets one of the girls to touch some sort of magical stone.
It’s all very intriguing so far, but despite the title of the film, this is not a movie about a zombie outbreak at a convention. Instead, the main group goes home, the girl who touched the stone apparently conjures up a zombie outbreak accidentally, and then a zombie shows up at their door.
This begins one of the major problems with the film. While the zombie fights are great, with tight makeup effects, intense action, and some gore, in every case, the group of friends screams throughout the entire fight. And none of these fights is short. It’s so irritating that it reminded me of how the main dude in Deadstream virtually ruins a great movie by screaming the whole time.
Anyway, the group then sits around just talking and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive the zombie apocalypse. Eventually they realize they have to go rescue the mom of the leader of their group. This is 57 minutes into the movie.
More zombie encounter sequences unfold as they make their way to the mom’s house. When they finally arrive, they have to take on some vengeful zombies. It’s another case of a lot of nothing going on in terms of moving any kind of plot forward. The film ends abruptly, and because it is labeled “volume 1” in the title, we know a sequel is the plan. I was definitely drawn to the characters and the performances of the likable cast, so I’ll definitely be looking out for it. I need to know how this story ends.
