Director Yeon Sang-ho continues to plough his furrow as Korea’s George Romero with his latest zombie film, ‘Colony’ which like his earlier film, ‘Train to Busan’ sees his protagonists trapped in a confined space that here is hotel tower block that is hosting a Bio-tech’s firms conference about an engineered mould that can communicate and regenerate. Quite the break through if it wasn’t that Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan) the scientist who had been pivotal in developing it, is disgruntled that the CEO has taken credit and the film begins with him informing the authorities that he has orchestrated an outbreak but has injected himself with the vaccine.
Inside the Colony…..
And the first person he will infect is the CEO who quickly transforms into a drooling, vomit prone, body jerking wreck prompting the question, ‘Why wasn’t our editor cast in the role?’ (You’re fired!’ – Ed). Sang-ho has hired contortionists, acrobats and break dancers to play the infected and it’s an inspired idea adopting brilliantly alarming spastic movements for the infected masses. It’s not the only thing that Sang-ho’s zombies adopt. Taking its cue from ‘The Last of Us’ these new zombies
Very quickly the attendees at the convention succumb to the attack of the infected but are able to adopt a collected IQ through a hive mentality that sees them learn and evolve. So their initial scrabbling around on all fours sees them progress to being able to stand on their legs and from there share information in a sort of human form of downloading standing rod straight staring into the sky as their new found knowledge pours into them. The idea being that their shared IQ makes the collective group even more dangerous though you’ve got to wonder that if surely they could be defeated if Brooklyn Beckham had been thrown into the mix.
Who can ever survive?
But it is bad guy Seo Yeong Cheol who is able to orchestrate the infected masses to his own ends that effectively gives him an army of the undead to command at will. With the infected covered in drool and the building interior drenched in gloop the environment soon takes on the look of a wanking convention.
But in amongst the infected mayhem there is of course the group of survivors trying to make it out alive and so we have loathsome self-interested, the ones with weakness – here’s it’s a character confined to a wheel chair, and the ones seemingly destined to make it out alive but not before those in the group betraying others whilst others make a self-sacrifice.
Colony might disappoint hardcore horror fans as this is far more of a thriller than the out and out gru-horror of Romero’s classic zombie films. Though it’s a little too long there’s a lot to like here with a load of neat ideas that we’ve not seen in zombie films before in a genre that is increasingly difficult to find a new angle.
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Here’s the Colony trailer….
