Zombieworld (2015)
Directed by: Adam O'Brien, Adrian Cardona, Camerin McCulloch, David Munoz, Jared Marshall, Jesse Baget, Luke Guidici, Paul Shrimpton, Peter Horn, Phil Haine, Rafa Dengra, Tommy Woodard, Vedran Marjanovic Wekster, Zachary Ramelan
Written by: Adam O'Brien, Alex Chandon, Cameron McCulloch, David Muñoz, Graham Taylow, Jared Marshall, Jonathan Brown, Luke Guidici, Paul Shrimpton, Peter Horn, Raven Cousens, Tommy Woodard, Zachary Ramelan
Starring: Bill Oberst Jr., Jennifer Lane Oakley, Marc Velasco, Noé Blancafort, Ry Barrett
In a world that has succumbed to the zombie apocalypse, news anchor Marvin Gloat (Bill Oberst Jr.) takes you around the globe and across time to look at different stories all set within the zombified world.
Anthology films are a tricky beast, and a subgenre that has recently come back to the fore with the likes of the V/H/S series, and they come loaded with their own unique pros and cons. The clearest con seems to be that with such a range of different stories, often helmed by different directors, then the quality from story to story can range wildly, sullying a film that might otherwise have very good sections and ideas to it. On the other hand, if there is a fallow segment you can be rest assured that another will be coming your way pretty soon that will hopefully offer you something better. They are also a device for giving short films a welcome break to a potentially wider audience, instead of being stuck in the ether of the internet and niche festival views. So does Zombieworld run with excitement like a rage infected victim or shuffle around, slowly falling apart? The answer, unfortunately, is the latter.
Laden with a glut of poor quality shorts, Zombieworld, trudges from mostly uninteresting and uninventive short to short offering nothing much to the anthology genre or the zombie genre, one which is really now being worn thin. The film mostly passes in a forgettable haze as we move from one country to another without much in the way of entertainment. Notable exceptions are one offering from Spain that gives us Jesus (Marc Velasco) and Judas (Noé Blancafort) fighting zombies in Jerusalem, including for some reason Cowboy Zombies, and is a short that is packed with more laughs, gore, inventiveness, originality and entertainment than most of the rest of the film. This comes nearly at the very beginning of Zombieworld so any floating hope is quickly snuffed out. A section from Ireland also has enough laughs to keep you entertained for its fleeting moment on screen.
The rest, unfortunately fall mostly flat. An opening segment tries to be exciting but somehow manages to include passable CGI and army vehicles but can’t make it look like a man missing an arm isn’t just holding it inside of his shirt. An attempt at merging video games and zombies is probably the worst of the lot, failing at representing both video games and zombies. Another has a small girl tricking a postman in a fleeting reference to zombies and feels like a short that shouldn’t really be included.
Zombieworld coughs up a final gout of entertainment in the short film Brutal Relax, again from Spain, which is quite entertaining and contains much silly and over the top gore and violence, but this is all too little too late and when Zombieworld finally gives up the battle you will be left with little to show for it.
Zombieworld is a fleetingly entertaining but mostly boring anthology film that has little invention or originality. A couple of shorts ably stick their head above the mud but it is not enough. Track them down online instead of putting yourself through the entire feature.
Rating: 
It wasn’t that good.