Ever since Danny Boyle's 2003 low budget gem, 28 Days Later, zombie movies have been a dime-a-dozen, so to speak. A genre as familiar to the 21st century cinema as smart phones or Instagram, their post apocalyptic setting has been recycled countless times by now, each new undead film offering less thrills than the one preceding it. But until now, not one flesh-eating horror flick could at least be called boring, since at least they supplied the audiences with a decent amount of ravenous, human flesh eating bloody gore, if not much else. Enter Dominique Rocher's latest "horror", The Night Eats the World, a zombie movie so dull and lifeless it may as well be The Undead in and of itself.
As Sam, the aspiring musician who visits his ex-girlfriend to pick up some old audio tapes he left behind - and on a night she happens to be throwing a massive party, no less - Andersen Danielsen Lie brings very little in terms of acting talent, or even general screen presence, to the role of a loner holed up in a Parisian apartment building during a sudden (and naturally unexplained) zombie outbreak. He spends the next ninety or so minutes playing a set of drums very loudly, shooting the wandering zombies on the street below with a paintball gun, and having cheesy, philosophical conversations ("Dead is the new normal. I'm no longer normal.") with a zombie, Alfred, who's trapped in his building's elevator. Of course, this is the kind of Paris where no one living speaks French, or even resembles a human being in the slightest amount of their behavior.
The Night Eats the World offers nothing new to the genre that's already exhausted all the good ideas; if anything, it dumbs down (by, ironically, trying to be too dramatic and character driven) and nullifies the horror it's supposed to generate. The result is a movie that future generations will watch only as a cure for insomnia.
D+
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