Apparently filmmaking reached Iowa at some point between the Manifest Destiny era and the present, because an independent Anti-Zombie film entitled ‘Collapse’ has been produced in the state that more than any other gets to pick our Presidential candidates:

The theatrical trailer for “Collapse,” an independent zombie film made primarily in West Branch has been posted online.

The 96-second trailer features plenty of blood, guts and West Branch locales. Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize the Jack & Jill grocery store, Main Street storefronts and a brief cameo by the Funcrest Bait & Tackle shop.

It was good of the filmmakers to cram in every major commercial establishment in West Branch (population: approximately 2,300) during their trailer; did the local Chamber of Commerce kick in some money during shooting?

If you watch the trailer (direct hyperlinks having not reached the Press-Citizen in Iowa) which I can’t embed below (YouTube apparently hasn’t reached Iowa yet either) you’ll see a fairly slick indie take on the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ scenario we deride so often here at the ZRC. I say fairly because a lot of the logical flaws manifest in the genre since Night of the Living Dead are in evidence here too, whether as homage or as derivative; the crudely boarded up farmhouse around which all the local Undead gather for some reason looms large.

As mentioned above, West Branch has a population of 2,300 people, more or less. If a crowd of, say, 100 recently revived Differently Animated citizens of the town arrive at one farmhouse, you’re talking about 4-5% of the entire population having picked a random direction and just happened to end up in one spot, out of the many thousands of acres of farms in the area. ‘Zombies’ in a Romero style Zompocalypse seem to have senses to rival Wolverine, or some form of precognition. Food for thought.

Of course that’s only if you assume they’re some kind of robotic, unfeeling life-form, as Zombie Apocalypse movies tend to do. If you know the Differently Animated are thinking and feeling beings, then you could assume they had come to your boarded-up farmhouse for some intelligent purpose, but that would get in the way of gunning them down for sport and audience amusement.

Maybe they just came over for some coffee? A slice of pie? A chat? Nobody ever thinks to find out if that is the case before the mayhem starts, do they?

And why is it that nobody ever knows how to board up a window in an Anti-Zombie movie, anyway? Hammers and nails aren’t that hard to use, folks. You shouldn’t need a master carpenter to slap up a half dozen boards, roughly parallel to the window frame, without leaving large and conveniently arm-shaped gaps that someone can reach inside through.

In this trailer we see the cycle of violence, so familiar to the ZRC, begin again, and the audience is right back in a world were law enforcement is helpless, the farmhouse is the last refuge, and children are inevitably bitten and turned into Zombies, at which point their parents either no longer love them or get eaten by them, perhaps both.

Only, it’s Iowa, so when it happens here it’s surrounded by cornfields.*

In summary, I think it’s safe to say the ZRC condemns this film for its Anti-Zombie cruelty. First for the all too commonplace shooting and violence against the Differently Animated on screen, yes. But second, just for making them lurch around Iowa. That was meanspirited, people. They’re not politicians or journalists; what did they do to deserve that gruesome fate?

*Note, from the trailer, it looks like the movie takes place in the fall, so the corn is already harvested. Sorry, corn-fans, who I assume overlap with Iowa tourists pretty heavily.

Note also: The ZRC does not actually hate Iowa to the extent depicted in this review. It’s humor. In reality we feel mostly pity and sorrow for our neighbors to the Southwest, and Wisconsin is probably even willing to send them aid in the form of cheese.

Tags: Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, February 12th, 2011 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.