As many times as they’ve been made, zombie movies can still excite. I can’t say for sure what the attraction is, why people keep making them.Is it such a classic sub-genre of horror films that so many strive to make the definitive zombie film? Is it because the bad guys (the zombies) don’t need anymore of a back-story than that they’ve gone crazy and hungry for human flesh from some mysterious disease; and from that, a quick and easy premise has been established that doesn’t need much exposition? And why do we keep watching them? Probably because the notion of a world populated by rabid humans is so frightening that one has to see how the good guys escape such an outrageous predicament.
Whatever the reason, the show goes on and these films are made. Some dull because there’s nothing fresh about them, some successful because they do actually feel like something you’ve never seen before. And the latter is the case with Rammbock, a German zombie movie that is shorter in length than the typical movie you leave your home to go see. If feature-length films are the equivalent to a novel, at 64 minutes this one is a novella, short and sweet, and more impactful than most of these kinds of films because it knows that diseased humans trying to eat regular humans can get old pretty quickly.
Michael, our dumpy hero, loves a woman named Gabi. One day, after she broke up with him, he arrives at her apartment to get her back. But instead of her, what he finds inside her home is a crazy maintenance man with eyes all white trying to eat his young apprentice. Once the maintenance man zombie is locked out of the apartment, Michael and the young apprentice named Harper team up trying to figure out a way to escape the zombies that are gathering outside their door and in the courtyard below.
This apartment complex is where 99.9 percent of the film takes place.It’s a great idea, probably one that will be copied by young filmmakers down the line, looking for a low-budget way to make a horror film. The way the drama and the suspense build so effectively inside the walls of the complex you’d think director Marvin Kren and writer Benjamin Hessler are paying homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. So when you have zombies filling the apartment buildings and surrounding the apartment complex, how do the non-zombies get into other apartments when certain things are needed, how do they ultimately save their lives by running away to a little boat stationed at nearby river they can use to paddle to a ship that will deliver them to safety? These are questions the film deals with in its short time, while in the process adding to the zombie mythology a very critical weakness the living dead all have in common.
Oh and remember Michael’s ex? The film tells us he’s in love with her and can’t let her go no matter what.We see him going through pictures of her in her camera with a longing in his eyes.He risks his life to retrieve his phone so he could call her and make sure she’s all right, though no one answers. When Harper, the apprentice, starts making weapons using her silverware, Michael wouldn’t dare let him destroy her property, not wanting to believe that she’s dead. But love that is meant to be can survive anything, or so they say, and this film seems to be playing on that. You’ll have one of those pleasantly surprised, even impressed, moments when you reach the end of the film, and begin to realize that perhaps Rammbock isn’t just a zombie movie, but rather a love story that just happens to have zombies in it.
Rammbock is currently playing at select AMC Theatres as part of the Summer-Long Foreign Horrofest
"Rammbock" opens May 4, 2011 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Marvin Kren. Written by Benjamin Hessler. Starring Michael Fuith.
