An excellent first rate zombie film! **** out of 5

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2005)

I love this film. Paul Anderson is a great director. Bold statement I know. A lot of you will disagree with me and I will tell you that you are probably just one of those guys who have seriously jumped on the bandwagon. Because that's basically all that it's amounted to. Paul Anderson has had the opportunity to direct films that have a extremely high expectancy level to them. And this alone is probably the reason he is lambasted so. Because no one can live up to a lot of fan boys expectations.
I myself am a fan boy, but I'm an open minded and not such a nit-picky one.
Anderson really knows how to construct a movie and tell a story quite well. The scares in this flick are anything but cliché. He knows how to scare us by providing an extremely high level of suspense.
The gore is low, and that is my main problem with the film. It's based on a video game that has buckets of it. There is some though. It isn't completely bloodless. But at least there is plenty of suspense and terrific action sequences. In the end that's what really matters.
Everything else though works completely. We are introduced to characters we genuinely care about and are sad to see it when they ultimately meet their untimely demise.
The special effects are terrific and the music by Marco Beltrami and Marilyn Manson is pulsating, creepy, and very unsettling.
It's a superior horror film that I highly recommend.