The Rezort

On Netflix, you’ll find The Rezort, yet another zombie movie (meeting with Jurassic Park), which has some good ideas but could have been much better.

I have been burnt out on zombie movies. I think they are all the same and in general they are in no way interesting to me. So when I saw The Rezort on Netflix my first instinct was to just pass it by, but when the next suggestion was a movie where Scobby-Doo meets Kiss I figured I could take a closer look. I made the right call.

The Rezort takes place after the zombie apocalypse and the world is trying to get back to whatever normal would be after global conflict with the living dead. There is famine and refugees from the areas scorched by napalm are flooding in, so there is a crunch on space and food in some of the better areas. There is also an island theme park where what remains of the zombie population are kept behind electric fences and are hunted for sport by the super rich, the curious, people who want to take their video games to the next level, and people traumatized by the zombie war who are trying to “take their lives back.”

The idea of a post zombie apocalypse movie with a little Jurassic Park mixed in was pretty intriguing to me so I let the flick play out. While it was pretty predictable and didn’t really live up to its cool premise, it was still a pretty fun watch. Seeing all of the tourists arriving on this island and hearing why they were there was interesting and something different for the zombie genre which is more typically full of people who are simply running for their lives. Here we have a diverse group of people who think that even the end of the world needs a sweet after party…and then start running for their lives.

Just like Jurassic Park the events of the show are initiated by someone with fiendish intentions messing with security. In this movie’s case it is a representative of a group who militantly fight for zombie rights…yeah. So once the security system goes down the movie plays out like your typical zombie adventure: wave of zombies gets fought off by our heroes, “holy shit we’re out of ammo,” heroes make their way through zombie territory looking for a way off the island, they all die except for survivor girl who makes a daring escape at the end to expose the horrors of zombie-staffed theme parks to the world. There is a neat twist near the end that adds a little drama to the survivor’s plight that revolves around where the park gets its “game.” If you are paying attention to what is going on it is not shocking, but it is handled very well and makes survivor girl’s last push at the end a little more dramatic and interesting.

The movie itself is about as good as you would expect for a low budget zombie flick but the effects and performances are all engaging and passable and make what could have been a real slog into something worth watching. Even the irritating zombie rights activist is tolerable as she goes from stupid person to unwitting sap to decent human and finally to martyr. The only real complaint I have here is some forced tension between survivor girl and her boyfriend, who was a solider during the war and who has clearly seen some shit who goes along with his lady so that she can reclaim her life and find out who she really is by killing zombies. Their squabble is brought on because the trained zombie killer is proficient at killing zombies and he is heartless in the act…as a soldier in the situation would probably be.

Overall I would say The Rezort was a great example of a really cool concept and a great idea inside a movie that just wasn’t really up to pulling it off. It does a WAY better job at working with its concept than garbage like The Purge but still really left me with a feeling they could have done with less screaming and running and focused a little more on all the neat plot elements that were dangled just out of our vision as the group rushed on by.

It’s still worth checking out though, just because it offers a new take a kind of movie that has grown super stale over the last decade of so…and it is probably less of a waste of time than the new Resident Evil flick.

Tags: netflix, review, the rezort, zombie movies

About the Author

Brando Quiring is an aspiring writer and all around good guy whose interests include giant robots, things that go bump in the night, spicy food, and smaller robots. He believes that through his studies of life around him and his contributions to it, he will some day save the world.