Hooptober X: The Devil Made Me Do It
#9: 2 post apocalyptic or natural disaster related films (1)
Netflix

Even though Netflix is skipping Halloween this year, they still have some good stuff if you know what to search for. Seriously, it looks like they're not putting out any new horror movies for October. Really disappointing after the FEAR STREET trilogy and MIDNIGHT MASS.

I probably would've gotten to RAVENOUS sooner if I wasn't burned out on zombie movies. And don't get me wrong, I still love Fulci's ZOMBI, Romero's Dead trilogy, BURIAL GROUND, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and so on, and I still watch them all religiously. But having seen so many great classic zombie movies, its tough to get excited about new ones that are often just rehashes of the aforementioned classics.

RAVENOUS, or THE RAVENOUS as it's called in the trailer, is worth watching. If you're a zombie purist like me, the monsters are more on the "infected cannibalistic humans" scale like 28 DAYS LATER than the classic rotting, shambling corpses. They can run. They can communicate to one another in shrieks. They even appear to feel pain. And you can kill them the same way you'd kill a normal person, without having to destroy the brain.

While I still prefer to Romero zombies -- and really, my very favorites are the musty, moldy Fulci zombies -- RAVENOUS' ghouls are still damn scary. At one point we see them massing to build a giant pile of furniture and junk, and just standing around staring at it. Why are they doing this? We don't know, and honestly I don't know of an explanation that wouldn't feel forced, so I'm OK with it. It works though, and their shrieks -- either to alert others of food, or in pain -- are pretty disturbing.

It's a beautiful film too. Lots of great lingering shots of the Canadian countryside. There's an excellent shot early on of a zombie mother and child standing in the middle of a path in the woods, staring out at a character. It's quite haunting. You get a lot of that in RAVENOUS. It's slow-going at times, but Robin Aubert is able to expertly build up tension and release it in a furious action sequence.