Film Review: WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021)

 WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021) Australia 1hr 28mins

Director: Kiah Roache-Turner

"You're all monsters, you're all the fucking same." - Grace

"Jesus Christ you're a hybrid!!" - Rhys

"You know what I can smell Rhys?? BRAINS!!!"- Surgeon General

Rhys (Luke McKenzie) is a soldier working for the Australian army in the wasteland of the on going zombie virus from the previous movie WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014). He spends his time finding survivors to hand over to the Colonel (Jake Ryan) and the Surgeon General (Nicholas Boshier)  to experiment on in the hope they find a cure. Or at least that is what Rhys believes anyway. Rhys is the twin brother of the Captain from ROAD OF THE DEAD who met a grisly death at the hands of Barry (Jay Gallagher) and his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who coincidently is now a hybrid (half human half zombie) due to the experimentation she endured in ROAD. Barry and Brooke are currently on the run and are wanted as terrorists by the Colonel. Having found their old mate Bennys nieces Grace (Tasia Zalor) and Maxi (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) they try to make a stand all together but Brooke is getting harder to control. When she bites Grace in a frenzy the sisters flee only to be caught by Rhys who hands Grace over to the Surgeon General. The questions here are how close to a cure is the Surgeon and is that even what the army are trying to do??

Seven years after WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014),  director Kiah Roache-Turner has tried to pick up where he left off with ROAD OF THE DEAD but missed out a huge part of what made ROAD so popular... the humour! There is a huge void here when you realise that Roache-Turner killed off all of the funny characters in the first movie and has tried to fill this void with characters that are vanilla at best. I was never that much of a fan of Gallagher or Bradey in ROAD as I found them both a little wooden so I was actually kind of relieved they arent in APOCALPYSE all that much. I think Roache-Turner made a bit of a mistake casting Luke McKenzie as the "nicer" character in this. McKenzie, of course, originally played the Captain in ROAD and he acted the bad guy perfectly so it was great to see him again as his twin brother, it's just a shame that they made him too nice and tried to turn him into the hero. The sisters, Zalar and Barnes-Cowan don't do anything wrong per se they just lack personality. One character I'm a bit confused about is the Doctor (as he was in ROAD) or Surgeon General as he is now known in APOCALYPSE. Played by different actors in the movies but acted in a similar way does this mean they are one and the same? This is my theory; I believe that they are the same character only I'm assuming the Doctor got himself a promotion during all the chaos! The Doctor cut his hand off in ROAD after being bitten by one of his zombie experiments under Brookes control. The Surgeon General has a zombie arm thing going on that isn't really explained so I'm guessing he sewed his hand back on and is now kind of a hybrid himself in constant battle with his arm. They both act as bat shit crazy as each other and are still wearing the same hazmat suit plus they have the same fascination with the nasal probe. That is my theory anyway but please correct if I have got this completely wrong!

Luckily the zombies are still as great as they were in ROAD and once again there is plenty of them. They still look fantastic and have that green gas coming out of their mouths. Time has moved on a little since the outbreak and the remaining survivors are using the zombies to power their homes and fuel their vehicles which is pretty cool. The Surgeon General has created a cyborg zombie that he controls by VR or some kind of mind control device to fight Brooke. This guy is super awesome! The zombies that Brooke can control seem to be a little smarter than the last time and a few of them pick up weapons and fire them. It does seem to be less about the zombies this time and more about wether or not the powers that be are working on a cure or just using survivors to further their experiments.

The soundtrack is as effective as before and features a few familiar tracks such as "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. I'm not knocking this song in anyway, I like it but I just think it has been used in so many different shows these last few years. The costumes and setting is still really awesome, the MAD MAX look fits in really well. The FX are perfectly acceptable and visually pleasing, there are still a lot of explosions and action scenes.

The main things that have really bugged me about APOCALYPSE are the lack of humour that I have already mentioned and the fact that they killed off so many good characters in the first movie that they lost the balls to kill off any of the characters in APOCALYPSE. Instead they do that really annoying thing of making you think that a character has died only for them to keep coming back several times over. In conclusion WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE is entertaining and fun in the sense of big action and zombies but it is devoid of humour, likeable characters and has a pretty dodgy script. Definitely not as good as ROAD. I score WYRMWOOD: APOCALPYSE 3 brains out of 5.

WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE is available to stream on Amazon Prime and on DVD and Blu Ray.