Extinction (2015)

Not to give away any of the plot, just to comment on the quality: it is not quite Dawn of the Dead or even Diary of the Dead, but it is very much better than the low budget zombie films. The acting is good, the non- zombie story line is engaging and the zombies aren't bad.

I am told I cannot submit this without ten lines of text, so I have to flesh out the review a bit, but not with padding words. So I will expand by noting that the acting is good enough to support a dramatic film, the horror aspects are good enough that we felt genuine stress watching the film. There were many parts where the tension builds and plenty of times as well where a good sudden scare caused us to jump.

Fmovies: Chances are Extinction will remind audience to other zombie or survival movies, such as I Am Legend or even The Walking Dead television series. It uses many familiar elements in this already packed subgenre and honestly it doesn't boast that high of production value. The saving grace is its human drama, which may not be perfect, but acted and crafted fine enough to present a solid survival story.

Patrick (Matthew Fox) and Jack (Jeffrey Donovan) are two neighbors surviving in cold wasteland. Both of them had unusual past which eventually drifted them apart, but they now must reconcile to protect a child from escalating threat. The pace is shifted from present to past regularly to showcase their backstories while the story moves forward.

This method does set some nice character developments, furthermore the actors are definitely capable enough to make it work, seeing that the runtime of nearly two hours revolve around them. It does feel a bit slow at times since the angst and redemption theme are repeated frequently. The movie tries to deliver a few twists, these might not be outright predictable, but not exactly strong and occasionally reaching too far to produce emotional tone.

Actual zombie assault takes much less portion of the movie than the drama, yet it is still made pretty well. Design and effects look better than most of smaller budget flicks. It won't look cheap or campy when the action starts, but it does tend to follow overused path of bald white creature and its quirky antics.

The effort put to personal story and action survival might not suffice to rise above the horde, but it doesn't go to waste since Extinction, despite its flaws, is adequate for a survival tale.

So, we have this winter-based survival horror movie that's been given tepid ratings and being passed off as a low budget zombie flick...

SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE!!! Extinction begins with no time to waste in setting the atmospherics and then killing a lot of people to sate the appetite of horror fans with high standards.

It starts out as a zombie horror but then becomes something along the lines of a Guillermo Del Toro horror movie or series (hint), but I must be frank. Del Toro writes better drama than he directs, at least compared to the director of this movie. Applause is deserved also for the writing. It keeps you guessing.

Also..

Setting, lush! Cinematography, lush! Special effects, lush! It's picture perfect and yet dynamic, which is pretty hard to pull off consistently over such a duration in movies with thriller elements.

Others may be put off by the pairing of Matthew Fox and Jeffrey Donovan and a young girl being placed between them. If that's your hang-up, you couldn't be any more wrong. They're intense, honest, creepy and down to the bone gutting. Nobody could have done it better and I'm not a huge fan of Fox or Donovan, but they delivered.

I also usually avoid horror films with kids, myself. I just think they get in the way. Quinn McColgan as Lu is bloody terrific and I doubt the film would have been as effective or terrifying without her slant on what takes place, without being typical of a fictional child. She's so thankfully devoid of cliché.

How subtly done and finely nuanced the characters are puts Stephen King to shame, without spoiling anything, meaning that you can hate them when you must, but you grow attached to them regardless, which is almost a forgotten art in horror.

That brings me to the end. Here's a great horror movie that needs to be recognised as a collectible. It's not run of the mill, it's not clichéd and it's not all drama with no gore or action on account of a child. It's what horror movies need to be right now; freezing out the water and thickening the blood again. It's the best survival horror gets and it's accessible to anyone with good taste.

If you want to compare it to other good similar survival horrors, I'd recommend watching it with the 2009 French movie Mutants and/or The Colony. That was pretty similar. In that it had snow and stuff...

Extinction fmovies. As far as the film goes, a tragedy takes place at the beginning of the movie which puts the two men against each other. Now when I first saw the trailer to this flick I knew it wouldn't be a high budget film. So going into the first 1 hr of the film had me a bit worried that it would be full of cheesy special effects. But instead the script writer maintains focus on the two protagonists and the kid, which is a smart way to do a low budget film less gore, less explosions, less cost. I found it to be quite scary at certain points especially when you see a camera turn away from one of the actors you know something is going to pop out behind. Matthew fox does a pretty good job maintaining a strange character with some sort of secret but if you're like me you can piece it together no problem. I really enjoyed the make up designs for the evolved zombies, but it didn't pan out to be as great as I expected. If you dig movies such as the descent or even 30 days of night I'm sure you will find a shed of enjoyment with the film. Don't over sell yourself thinking it is a complete sleeper it will have its moments, but unfortunately a short hand of them.

I'm surprised that I went to the trouble of registering and then writing a review for THIS movie. First time movie review for me. I saw a preview of Extinction on another movie I watched at home and it looked intriguing. Despite all the free streaming I get, I even paid $3 to watch this. Happy to say I was not disappointed, in fact, I was impressed. This is a solid piece of movie making. Cinematography was evocative and effective, creating a powerful framework for the story...and even played with some of the themes of the movie; there were a few scenes when the blues of winter almost looked like greens and I questioned what I was looking at...is that grass? Or snow? Hope or no hope?

Acting was solid. I like both of these actors. I was introduced to Jeffrey Donovan recently on the 2nd season of Fargo and I get it now, he is good. Mathew Fox is convincing. The girl also is a fresh new face.

Zombies, and I'm a bit of an expert here, are sufficiently terrifying because they are fast enough and slow enough to scare you (World War Z...too fast and as a result not much of a connection. Walking Dead, too damn slow). Don't want to expound on this too much as it would spoil it.

But the real treat for me was the story and ensuing questions that inevitably accompany such a plot. It's one of the reasons I loved Walking Dead 1st season so much. In the face of such adversity, what would I do? Again, no spoilers, but I found myself wondering what I would have done and any time a movie can get me to talk to myself, I know it's doing something right.

Lastly, the more important plot within a plot, the relationship, was cleverly peeled back a little at a time. Not too little to annoy me, but enough to intrigue me. This is what sets this apart from other 'zombie' movies. It's really less about them and more about the 'remains of the day' that make this a winner in my book.

I believe this movie was never released in theaters, too bad, but glad I found it.

I've been compelled to write this review after reading the former ones. As this film is quite remarkable in many things I can only understand the very bad reviews as spurious stuff. Why I say that comes below: Very good performances. Matthew Fox, Jeffrey Donovan and the girl Quinn McColgan are perfect in their work. You really get into the movie with them. There's always a narrative nerve that never decays. The photography is usually evocative. The characters are elaborated and likely. They evolve as the screenplay unfolds. The movie is, in general, entertaining and the action scenes are well filmed. Maybe is not the most original sci-fi movie but no doubt it's a more than decent one.