Day 23 - Mutants (2009)

I had originally been under the impression that this French film was going to be a straightforward zombie movie. It isn’t. Mutants is so much more. This film also seems to contain in it an answer to the dispute amongst zombie fans about the use of the term zombie in such cases as the 28 Days Later series. According to the logic of this movie they are not in fact zombies, but Mutants.

Mutants jumps straight into the story of paramedics Marco and Sonia – who seem to be lovers as well as partners – sometime after a virus has spread through the world changing people into ravaging, cannibalistic monsters. Traveling with a member of the army towards a military safe zone called the NOAH base, the group soon comes into trouble leaving Marco and Sonia alone, stranded at an abandoned building in the mountains. Things go from bad to worse as Marco begins slowly and painfully changing into a mutant. As if things weren’t bad enough, things become even more complicated once another group of survivors shows up and all hell breaks loose.

I was really impressed by Mutants. Though there’s no great character development, and the story isn’t all that original, this was still fun to watch. There were plenty of good scares, the monsters were frightening and grotesque, and above all the cinematography was excellent. Everything sort of denigrates towards the end however. The story gets a little odd in certain aspects that cheapened it for me and over exposure of the mutants seemed to make them less ominous and scary than they were at the start. Despite its flaws, the excellent use of bodily horror through the first half of the film, its slow building sense of dread, and the visual quality throughout, seems to adequately make up for whatever this film maybe lacking.

This is a simple yet beautiful movie, and though there isn’t much to it, fans of 28 Days Later and similar movies will likely enjoys Mutants as much as I did.

For Day 24 I’ll be reviewing Black Sunday (1960).