Jay Gallagher is Barry, a mechanic living in the Outback with his wife Annie (Catherine Terracini) and daughter Meganne (Meganne West). Amidst a meteor shower, his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) is attacked and the culprits turn out to now be zombies. Brooke escapes and calls Barry to tell him to leave town quickly, so he does, but not before Annie and Meganne themselves zombify en route and he has to kill them both himself. Then as he flees into the bush, trying several times unsuccessfully to commit suicide, Barry meets fellow survivors Chalker (Yure Covich), Benny (Leon Burchill) and Frank (Keith Agius), who tells them all about a secret garage/laboratory where a deranged doctor (Berynn Schwert) is conducting dangerous operations on captured survivors of the pandemic. Now they continue down the road to find this doctor and rescue Brooke, but meanwhile she shows she doesn't need that much help.
The description you can see on the poster above, about this one feeling like Mad Max meets Shaun of the Dead, isn't far off the mark. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, also known simply as Wyrmwood, is also loaded with unabashedly ocker Aussie humour. It's hard to watch occasionally, particularly if you're trypanophobic like me, but even so I had quite a bit of fun taking this ride. Director and editor Kiah Roache-Turner and his brother, co-writer Tristan here serve up a relentless serving of splatter and shocks with unusually intelligent plotting as its spine (for instance our heroes use petrol and fire-lighting items for combat after discovering zombie blood and breath are both flammable, and psychic powers also feature near the end), but their enthusiasm for slasher horror action becomes quite infectious (pun intended). That enthusiasm also rubbed off on their cast, with Agius and Burchall especially enjoying themselves here, and as I said Bradey and the Roache-Turners admirably make Brooke into a quite resourceful and physically and mentally strong heroine instead of just another helpless scream queen.
If I have any criticisms, they are that it maybe could've become really rollicking just a bit sooner and the pacing is slightly inconsistent. But for a post-apocalyptic slasher flick made on a budget of just $160 000, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is very entertaining indeed and it arguably even could be mentioned alongside other contemporary Antipodean horror flicks like Wolf Creek, The Loved Ones and Deathgasm. A sequel, Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, opens around Australia this Thursday. 8/10.
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