Better off dead: 'Osombie'

Instead of taking advantage of potential to be outrageous, 'Osombie' comes across as a standard war movie.

Osombie – The Axis of Evil Dead is an independently produced low budget zombie film, which fails to live up to the cleverness of its title and the delicious novelty of its concept. Instead of taking advantage of the great potential to be outrageous in its storytelling, the film merely comes across as a standard war movie, with a slight zombie twist. Let’s just get this out of the way: a John Romero zombie film, it is not.

The film stars the drop-dead gorgeous Maxim model Eve Mauro as Dusty, a young yoga teacher from Colorado traveling across Afghanistan in an attempt to rescue her sibling Derek, who has come to the war-torn nation to discover if Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Derek, who is a nutty conspiracy theorist, after reading up theories on the internet, believes the al Qaeda leader is not dead, and doesn’t accept the story that the world’s most wanted man was buried at sea after being killed in Pakistan. Dusty’s  rescue mission is joined by a Nato Special Forces team, who explain to her that a chemical attack on the water resources of the terrorists has somehow resulted in the radical group becoming zombified. But what they don’t know, yet eventually learn, is that Osama Bin Laden has returned from being dead in the sea as a zombie, and is leading an undead terrorist army.

The acting in Osombie is unsurprisingly wooden, considering the amateur cast. But the film could have overcome its B-movie roots is in terms of creativity, which it lacks sorely as well. While there are plenty of death sequences, they lack the cleverness that makes such scenes interesting in better zombie films. And while featuring decent production values, the film is also regrettably rawboned in the gore department. Although the movie’s action is plentiful, it is strictly standard fare, and doesn’t feature much in the way of fleshy horror sequences that you’d expect from a zombie flick. In the end, while Osombie isn’t a terrible film, it just doesn’t have nearly enough meat on its bones to be a classic zombie film.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 27^th, 2012.