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A group of friends go for a camping trip in the deep rural backwoods and have no technology or any contact with the outside world. What they did not know was that the world had been taken over by a zombie infestation a fact they try to make sense of after they visit an abandoned farm and one of their friends gets infected and transforms into a bloodthirsty machine within the ‘28 Days Later’ universe. Coincidentally, these zombies seem to always perish a few hours after they start their feasting frenzy, so the title of this film truly fits.
This type of movie is definitely the most inflated one when compared to the other horror subgenres. It seems each and every filmmaker has at least one zombie story that they can tell and as soon as they have something to share, it ends up being more and more the same as the last one. To be truthful, when was the last time especially when it comes to direct-to-market films one saw an original zombie film? I can think of a few in the past couple of years (again off the top of my head, and I am sure someone will point out more) Wyrmwood, Zombie Resurrection, and I Survived a Zombie Holocaust. Zombies have slowly crept into the mainstream, however, what these three particular zombie movies had in common was that they were atypical in at least one aspect.
Wyrmwood took inspiration from the horror and post-apocalyptic genres, Zombie Resurrection turned the comedy up to absurd levels, and I Survived a Zombie Holocaust used the mix of humor and slapstick that made other Ozploitation horrors like Dead-Alive and Bad Taste so popular. Now let’s see what 3 Hours Till Dead offers. Not much apart from the ‘three hours of life’ concept, which is not even introduced until much later. This concept really detracts from the notion that the movie’s protagonists CAN wait for the zombie outbreak to end. But then again, if that were the case, there wouldn’t be a movie. The clear direction the film is trying to take is having books ‘expire’ after three hours of being zombies and the protagonists casually knowing this fact. This would have given 3 Hours Till Dead an edge over the competition. However, having the decision based on a character, instead of action, decision would only work if the situation were more intriguing. More of an innovative take on the zombie genre. Something closer to Assault on Precinct 13 instead of Dawn of the Dead.
Despite its promising title, 3 Hours Till Dead fails to deliver the necessary impact. For starters, we have “zombies on a farm,” which can quite easily be written off as an unimaginative flooding of stereotypes that an average consumer of zombie media is exhausted from. From the onset, the storyline lacks creativity, including the hero of the film an AWOL soldier suffering from PTSD. That has the potential to serve as a great basis for a psychological character study, but in the end, it is dropped like a bad habit. As I watched the movie, I found myself trying to construct scenarios that preceded these character events just to make his actions more believable than the filmmakers intended. Besides that, he is quite bland and hardly gets any development throughout the runtime of the movie.
The sole “highlight” of the movie that comes to mind is in fact its climax. It isn’t happy. The zombies, after all, do win but not without a fight. There is something quite wrong when the downbeat ending serves as the culmination of better parts of the movie.
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