31 Days of Halloween: Outside

2024, Carlo Ledesma -- Netflix

Full disclose; watching after October, but inserting into the empty spots, just because.

There is an aspect of zombie flicks that I would say started when The Walking Dead kicked off 14 years ago, in that the story is more about the humans than about the zombies, or the apocalypse, or more facetiously, "the humans are the real monsters here...." I think I have distinctively tired of that aspect.

Fourteen years ago I was fully immersed in the zombie survival story, in The Walking Dead, where we found out Rick and his wife Lori were having marital issues, and she ended up sleeping with Rick's best friend, and deputy, Shane. I mean, yeah they all thought Rick was dead, but... it was For the Drama. These days, this drama just tires me out.

I get it, you often write in interpersonal disputes to round out the characters, to make them more relatable, make them more human so they don't end up just being cardboard zombie killing machines. But I tire quickly when the human drama overshadows the survival story. Maybe its just me now, but I don't need to hear about your issues.

The movie opens with a family escaping an existing zombie apocalypse. The van they are riding in is damaged and covered in filth, dirty bloody handprints covering it all over, showing what they have come through to get here. The "here" is the family hacienda, the home where the parents of Francis (Sid Lucero, The Fake Life) live(d), a place he hasn't been to in decades because his father was an abusive asshole. After dispatching his zombified mother and finding his father dead from a self-inflicted bullet, Francis moves his family in.

Of note, this is a movie from the Philippines and the family home is a familiar character from other South Asian movies, what I can only think is a colonialist style of large home. I could probably find at least 3 other South Asian horror movies on Netflix right now that have such a house dominating the story. I suppose that is no more prevalent than Gothic Victorian Mansions playing the part of haunted houses in all American horror movies from an era. I wonder when they will be supplanted by McMansions from the last twenty years....

But all is not right in the little family. Iris (Beauty Gonzalez, Stolen Life), the mother, is more than a little shell shocked, and its not just from the zombies. Apparently she and her husband were already on the outs before people started eating each other. Francis owed a lot of people a lot of money, and it felt like it had only recently been revealed that she slept with his brother at least 15 years prior and Francis's oldest son Josh was actually his brother's child. Francis has only dragged the family to this last place he would ever go due to some desperate attempt to show control over his family situation. And control is all he really wants. They could have gone to a safe zone but he chose otherwise.

I would have been fine if this was established as character development, but this becomes the whole fucking movie. This movie is less about the zombies and more about Francis unravelling. And sure, if you want a movie about the drama of a man coming undone as the cycle of abuse repeats itself, then at least do it well. I am so tired of the cliches of a "weak man" being depicted as the one wearing glasses and a little chubby, while his more handsome, six-packed, perfect-haired brother is the "strong one".

Eventually the movie plays up to a point where Francis starts stopping his family from going "outside", not because there are zombies out there, but because freedom is out there. None of it makes sense; if no one goes outside, then there is no water, no food and death soon to come. But I guess that is supposed to be part of his psychosis?

The movie does try to redeem Francis, the external forces (the zombies) forcing him to actually protect his family instead of abusing them, but too little, too late and there is no way anyone was actually going to have sympathy for him.

But what about the zombies? At least the little part they played had some interesting ideas. They are not actually the undead, just infected people who ignore bodily harm as much as the walking dead do, but Iris does point out that they are dying off, all on their own, the bodies breaking down. They also have a little affectation that has shown up in a few zombie movies over the last years, in that their brains seem to be stuck in the last thing they were doing, the last utterances which they repeat over and over, full of anger and remorse, instead of guttural moaning. Still, not enough to redeem the movie anymore than Francis was.

Of note: because of the poster I swore the movie was going to be about the family retreating to a bunker where things would get worse, but I see now that was just a depiction of the basement, oddly ornate, where Francis was abused by his father as a child.