Fantasia ’10 Review: ‘EVIL: IN THE TIME OF HEROES’

We got another review from a member of the staff from Nightmare Revue, Michael Mitchell.  This review is being republished by permission from Jeremy Webster and Nightmare Revue.  Again, mucho kudos.

by Michael Mitchell

Attempting to sell a zombie movie to the paying public today is setting yourself up for a tall task indeed. May as well just make a vampire movie set in middle-America teenland. Oh, or make a movie about a young magician at a wizard-school. Let’s face it, not only are you dealing with a hell of a lot of competition, both historical and current, you’re also dealing with a fair bit of fatigue. That better be some dang good snake oil, mister!

Yet Yorgos Noussias’ EVIL: IN THE TIME OF HEROES may just be GREAT: IN THE TIME OF GENERALLY CRUMMY…

Set in both present-day Greece as well as Greece 3000 years ago, this particular zombie movie may very well be even better than I think it is, and maybe better than even the film-makers hoped it could have been.  But with the opening in ancient Greece around a campfire, where tales have been told since antiquity, and the offering of a test of sorts to the audience less than ten minutes in, one also wonders if they didn’t know exactly what they were up to, as if they were ready (after warming up with 2005’s related EVIL) to spin a decisive yarn and a half. For when “the test” comes (our band of intrepid heroes are surrounded inside a soccer stadium—that’s all I will say) you can almost feel Noussias playing with us, as immediately afterwards a zombie is decapitated and proceeds to blunder around like the proverbial chicken-with-its-head-cut-off; or, if you prefer, like a mindless film that has lost its direction. But has it? Or are the film-makers just setting us up for a ride that twists down unexpected, yet perfectly acceptable trails? Because, if you stick with the narrative, it becomes clear that the hands guiding this tale are sure, confident, and, always at the right moments, playful. (A pot-bellied father competes with his son for the affections of a comely survivor who has holed up with them, resulting in one of the best uses of a middle finger salute in the history of filmdom later on.)

Focusing on a group of survivors in a virus-ravaged Greece (not unlike what happened to Britain in 28 DAYS LATER), EVIL is a testament to the adage that even though there may be nothing new under the sun, there are still ways to make it interesting. Yes, the monsters are, once again, us uninhibited. Yes, some of the people trying to eat our faces off are the very same people we just spent 3 days attempting to nurse back to health. Yes, some good people will die. And, yes, the views of humanity are nihilistic and dark. Are the marauding non-infected vigilantes actually worse than the mindless zombies? It seems so.

EVIL is jam-packed with characters (good, bad, ambiguous) that resonate more than they have any right to. Honestly, who would have thought that a zombie movie, in 2010, could be so engaging? There’s no narrative fat to trim (it clocks in at 88 minutes). The romances are credible, not an easy feat in a zombie movie anymore. And the storyline is inventive and engaging. It’s not hard to see why Billy Zane (playing a balding Greek eternal—we always suspected!) signed on to this project.

The ending doesn’t cop out, either. After supplying a bit of a feel-good Hollywood focus-group release, there’s a sucker punch that asks us if, no matter how hard we work to eradicate and eliminate evil, and no matter the personal sacrifice endured, whether it’ll just find ways, albeit through ignorant and misguided ones, to resurface. And at our own hands again, no less. It asks us if it isn’t better to just save our own skins and let everyone else go to hell. But the beauty of EVIL is that we’re so caught up in the film that we don’t even realize we’ve been asked. Only the great movies do that. Maybe this one is one of them.