Colin

Its been the talk of the British horror movie community for the entire year, how newcomer director Marc Price manage to piece together a 90 minute movie and get it seen in cinemas for just £45. Using niceness and lots of cups of tea, the director managed to persuade hundreds of people to donate there time, items, homes or expertise to make the ultimate low budget horror movie.

Colin looks at a zombie invasion from the point of view of a zombie, as the movie opens Colin has just been bitten and returning to the sanctuary of his home, is then attacked by his roommate Damien. Slowly Colin changes from fully functioning human being to shuffling zombie alone in his house. From there on Colin ventures out of the comfort of his four walls and heads out onto the street in search of something.

Colin is being described and raved about as the zombie movie with a heart, circling the character of Colin from human to zombie, to victim of the human race as he is repeatedly attacked, and miraculously manages to survive a series of assaults by the zombie hating (and understandably so) human race.

Director Price has had an incredibly good year off the back of his project; his movie has screened at Cannes, Frightfest, and now enjoys selected cinema and consecutive DVD release (in the UK). The reviews of Price’s movie have been phenomenal, everyone stating the guy is a genius.  But like the grim reaper, I’m going to have to put a stop to this…

There is a certain politeness with British people, I’m guilty of it myself at times, and this is to praise things that run against the odds. In a normal world Colin might just have got to Frightfest before vanishing into obscurity, however we have embraced this low budget offering and given it high praise, not because of what it is, but because of what it has achieved. Not only did Price manage to make the movie, he secured make up and make up artists from the last X-men movie, then he got it seen; and congratulations on Price, however the simple fact is that Colin is not a good movie.

I should add before I start that I’m sure that Price has created something better than I could have manage, and again I commend him. However I certainly would have put more dialogue and story into the movie. Colin suffers from severe lacks in understand ability, its not just that didn’t get it, its that the director shifts of course and picks up side projects or storylines if you prefer that seem at times almost bunged in to fill a commitment of running time. The actors if actors is the right word often just seem to go of and do there own thing, I’m talking of the zombie cast here I should add, whom just wonder about making noises and sometimes inventing there own depictions of how a zombie would behalf; the worst example being at a house siege where a long haired zombie behaves like none of the other zombies. But it goes beyond the acting; lots of scenes literally seem jumbled together. So my first real criticism I guess is that like any workplace, if you have lots of people you need to be able to control them.

When working on the heart aspect of Colin you are confronted with the family of Colin who try to tame him, or revert him back to his human self. The whole process of this is incredibly long and dragged out almost in an arty way, but failing miserably. When the inevitable happens and Colin cant be tamed of his victim the only thought that came to mind was “couldn’t they have dressed her in a better outfit?” And more annoyingly no sooner has this aspect of the story been picked up, than its been discarded leaving me wondering what happed to the victim, and what happened to the rest of the family, and more so the awful looking woman who plays Colin’s mother, who looks nothing like her children, and has zero acting skill.

The biggest issues are lighting and boredom, Price used a camcorder to make the movie and I’m guessing that dark scenes never quite worked right and what Price has done (I’m assuming) has shot scenes in daylight, or low light and then added the effect of darkness, creating this ugly looking hue onscreen. The dark seems are almost at times unwatchable. But the worst aspect of all is boredom; I was bored rigid as scenes that could have been told in seconds were dragged out into minutes, sometimes-great numbers of minutes. Who really wants to see the same zombie slowly shuffling down a corridor for several minutes? Who wants to see family scenes literally dragged out without you really knowing them or what they are about? My biggest piece of advice being if your going to create meaningful scenes, then give them meaning.

Yes Price has been very clever to construct this movie, however please stop praising him for something that is really not that great, because in doing so you creating another potential ego for someone who has achieved only one thing, to create a gathering of people, because for the things that Colin is, one thing its not a movie, let alone a good one!