2025, Kimo Stamboel (Headshot) -- Netflix
A family patriarch is gathering his family at their home in a small village outside Jakarta, Indonesia. He is Sadimin (or Dimin; Donny Damara, Hotel Sakura), a greying widower who married Karina (Eva Celia, The Shadow Strays), his daughter Kenes' (Mikha Tambayong, Blood Curse) childhood best friend, which caused an irreparable rift between the two women. Kenes husband, whom she is also at odds with due to his infidelity, is there to finish a merger with Dimin's small but lucrative herbal supplement company. I guess herbal medicine is big there? Unfortunately Dimin's rushing to produce a new age defying concoction before his scientists have tested it thoroughly and downs a sample. Amazing, it takes decades off his appearance.
Except under an hour later, he dies in painful throes and is turned into a zombie, immediately attacking his family and staff. His staff succumb pretty quickly, while one grounds man who got sprayed in the face with blood drives off seeking medical help. He only gets as far as a large family gathering celebrating a circumcision (!!!), before he too succumbs to the zombie infection, slamming his car into the celebration crowd and immediately munching down on them. Thus the plague has begun.
Like most zombie that take place at the beginning of the plague, its about a small group fleeing the ravenous hordes of flesh eating dying and dead. There are the two young women, Kenes' husband & son and eventually another couple who they blunder into. The small village doesn't make for many secure buildings, so everyone ends up at the local police precinct where all but one cop have been eaten & transformed. How will they survive? Or more typically, who will survive.
The movie had two things going for it: a very very good special effects budget, and choosing to have the movie set absent of any "zombie" mythology at all, i.e. even the video game playing, crossbow building brother-in-law doesn't bring up zombie lore. The practical effects are pretty impressive here, and the drone shots of the running hordes along the narrow right angle streets between the rice fields in the lush, verdant rural village are incredible. CG or a cast of hundreds of extras? Hard to tell, which is a good thing. This movie treats its zombies as something of its own, their own gnashing teeth, their own twisted contortions and the panic stricken irrational responses of the survivors. These people have zero situational awareness, but they don't know they are in a zombie movie, so... In some ways, a little silly, but it takes itself seriously.
Note: I watched this on my own, as seasonal filler, and even if Marmy had been interested in a zombie movie, and she isn't, this one would have immediately turned her off. It depicts the infection moving quite quickly through the body, visualized by a spread of holes in the flesh akin to those caused by parasites, giving a quick trypophobic reaction to even me, who is not bothered by it. It was gross; gross gross gross.
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