LYNCH MOB – Quite a fun indie horror which pitches mobsters against the cannibalistic denizens of a small hamlet. In probable homage to '2000 Maniacs', the latter are undead ghosts because of an ancient curse cast against them for being horrible slave murderers back in the day. A creepy mob informer whose taste for torture is one of his more wholesome predilections is hiding out in the small, small town... pretty soon he realises that if he wants to keep alive it's not just the cops who he has to strike deals with. 'Lynch Mob' goes on for a bit long, but doesn't feel too padded. There's lots of splatter, most of it quite effective. The tone is darkly comedic but doesn't strain too far in the direction of broad laughs, which would always be a temptation with this kind of material. Nice to see Tony Darrow playing true to form again. I'm always a bit disappointed that he never quite manages to match what must've been the pinnacle of his career, the 'Street Trash' end credits theme. “I'm gonna eat your fockin' eyeballs like grapes” he sang back then, and sadly 'Lynch Mob' isn't a musical (although it could've been a pretty good one), but even so I'm pretty sure at least someone here gets their eyeballs munched at some point, or failing that some other part of their anatomy. Worth checking out.
ZOMBIE FIGHT CLUB – Some kind of viral outbreak has led to a zombie takeover. Bad news for the residents of a high rise apartment block – they're about to be massacred by the undead, of course. Here comes a SWAT team to sort it all out – hold on, they're only in it to nick some money off a gang. Everyone else is a rapper shagging some girls, a girl shagging some rappers, or on drugs. Or a school teacher who's doing his own daughter. ZFC has been accused of ripping of 'The Horde'. 'The Horde', which is objectively a much better film, was about siege type dynamics in a high rise zombie situation, whereas ZFC is just a random series of episodic zombie attacks. In lieu of any sympathetic characters, and because it so clearly is just the same old shit refried and repackaged, ZFC understands that the only way to get a bit of momentum going is to throw loads of crazy stuff at the wall and hope that some of it sticks. So we have a little incest, some random mutoid 'The Thing' type references, then an abrupt left turn into Mad Max 3 territory, all drenched in a heavy shower of gore. Don't get excited – that's CGI gore, an acquired taste. But all things considered, ZFC, which comes from the hands of the guy who made the equally wacky 'Zombie 108', does manage to mark itself out from the multitude of flesh munchers ordinaires on the back of its sheer stupidity, and, by the time we're suddenly told - “it's three years later. Society lives underground and is governed by that milquetoast pedo teacher from earlier on, who has somehow risen to become a kind of Nazi general surrounded by dominatrix concubines. Folks, he's decided to rip off 'The Walking Dead' and has a tortured relationship with his now undead daughter, who he keeps chained up. Everyone else gets stuck in a gladiatorial arena and is ripped apart by zombies” - quite frankly, we're not that surprised. 'Zombie Fight Club' – it's pure shite, concentrated until poisonous, then converted into a stream of zeros and ones and burned onto disc by someone who probably died of a disease. You might like it. Most people probably won't. Maybe it's the future.
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