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Klas (Klas Björkman) is a gun wielding, chain-mail garbed crusader who hunts zombies. For years he’s been on the path of the Überzombie (Valerio Amico), an undead creature who roams through a huge graveyard outside Stockholm, catching and dragging the unaware to his lair. One night, when the zombie grabs a blonde business woman who’s taking a shortcut through the cemetery, Klas is able to trail them to the zombie’s lair: an abandoned railroad tunnel beneath a mountain.
Unlike most zombie films, Mr. Engström’s zombies are more like vampires; rather than eating their prey, they bite their victim in the neck, thereby creating another roaming zombie. Klas tries to destroy him when he realizes that the monster wishes to turn the girl into a zombie, but gets beat by the virtually unstoppable creature. Knocked out, Klas is unable to prevent the undead leader from raising the girl up as one of his followers. When he comes to, Klas realizes that he will have to destroy not one zombie, but two.
Content
The story behind Zombie Psycho STHLM may sound like every other zombie film you have ever seen, but it is actually cleverer than many horror movies. For one, it deals with an active protagonist, rather than a passive protagonist, which is very unusual for horror films. (Just think of movies like “Halloween” and “Deep Blue Sea”, where people are simply running from an overwhelming opponent.) Instead, this has a greater resemblance to action movies like “Blade” or John Carpenter’s “Vampires”, where the protagonist is out to seek and destroy the monsters.
The acting from both Björkman and Amico were believable and appropriate, with most of the acting coming out through use of their facial expression and body language, more than using verbal tirades.
The overall ending worked quite well in this film, with a well-conceived commentary on what paranoia will lead you to. However, there was one issue that nagged at me that gives away some of the ending, so I will list it beneath the Spoilers section below.
Warning! Spoilers ahead
As Klas is fighting with the zombie in the tunnel, he throws a grenade at the zombie, which just bounces off him and does not detonate. Later, through a series of events, Klas essentially leads the zombie to crawl over the top of the un-detonated grenade, at which time the grenade does explode and blows up the super zombie. For this to make sense, we really need to clearly understand why the grenade didn’t go off. Normally, a grenade not going off means it is a dud, and therefore essentially cannot go off. For future films, this sort of thing will nag at an audience and needs to be addressed.
Visual Look
The visual look of this film was really solid. The costuming was thought out well, with a strangely medieval, armored getup for the crusader and appropriately tattered clothing for the Überzombie. The sets were well chosen, with a panoramic graveyard for the introductory scene, a spooky train tunnel for the middle scene, and the sweeping city of Stockholm for the concluding scene.
The camerawork was strong and made sense for the horror genre, with lots of steadycam that has been made to resemble shaky handheld, but with far fewer headaches for the viewers than actual handheld can induce! The large panoramic, establishing shots of the different sets helped create the believability of the world that Mr. Engström created. One of the coolest shots in the film was perhaps the most dangerous shots. To add a big budget bang to the film, Klas and the zombie end up fighting underneath a moving railroad car, with Klas pulling his head off the track right before he can be crushed by the massive wheels. In Hollywood, this would be a fully faked out stunt, but Mr. Engström and his crew did it for real. (As he macabrely jested about a few of the effects in his commentary track, it was lucky that no one died in these stunts or the film might have been a snuff film, instead!) While this shot was definitely dangerous, the shot that came directly after it looked amazingly cool. Since the car is rolling over Klas, the zombie hangs from the undercarriage of the car, waiting to snag Klas as he swings by the camera: well thought out and well orchestrated shot that looked good. (With that said, for any other filmmakers reading this, please take appropriate safety measures with stunts, because people really can die if you do any of these sorts of things on your own films)!
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