Film Review: LA HORDE

After “High Tension,” “Martyrs,” and “Frontier(s)” you’d think that French cinema had cornered the market on controversial and realistic violent cinema in the past few years but directors Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher have taken the zombie genre and turned it on head in the film “La Horde.”

When one of their own is killed four corrupt cops break into an abandoned tenement building searching for the gangsters responsible. Nothing goes as planned as the cops find themselves ambushed by the gangsters and just when they think they are about to lose their lives the world is thrust into chaos by a zombie outbreak which traps them in the building. Now forced into an uncomfortable partnership the cops and gangsters must learn to trust each other in order to get out of the zombie infested building alive.

This would sound like standard zombie film fodder but the screenplay is smarter than it appears as people on both sides have ulterior motives and allegiances change as their situation grows more chaotic by the minute. Also, the dead are hording the bodies of the fallen and have their own agenda.

It is not fair to simply look at this film as a simple zombie film when there is so much more going on. It’s about family and trust and being able to trust your enemies when a greater threat arises. It’s also about violence, action, and carnage as there is a lot of that in this film as well. This is a hardcore zombie film from the “28 Days Later” and “Dawn of the Dead” remake mold. Zombies run fast. Kill lots. Spread blood everywhere and caught in between are corrupt cops and gangsters who seem to have an endless supply of bullets. The only deterrent of the film is the fact that both the cops and gangsters can’t seem to get it through their thick skills that the only way to kill the zombies is through a gunshot to the head despite the fact that the very first zombie they encounter they kill by blowing off his head. There are numerous scenes in which the characters unload hundreds of bullets on a single zombie just for the sake of doing so. These scenes get old really fast. This is a small problem with the film as it makes up for it in the last thirty minutes of the film where there are more surprises than a zombie film should have. Dahan and Rocher create some truly horrifying imagery that will go down in zombie history as some of the best scenes around and the closing moments of the film are not what you are expecting (as befitting a French horror film). This is not one to be missed.