Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday November 02nd, 2025
The little guy, squeaky voice
After enjoying Bet's direct and in-your-face approach to addressing social issues, here's another example of simply telling your audience how you feel about something.
Focusing on the lives of the patrons of a small queer bar, who find themselves in the midst of an alien invasion of sorts as the local population of cis, straight men find themselves taken over by a parasite that turns them into violent zombies who eat gay and trans people. The film almost literally tells you that Jordan Peterson is a glossy turd turning men into raging neanderthals. Garth Marenghi, eat your heart out.
Lets start with the positives. The lighting technicians absolutely understood the assignment. Despite the lack of budget1 the interior shots always look interesting and arresting. The film has it's own neon-noir style which I loved. It hides the basic set design and really makes the parasite/blood effects pop. The ooze and gloop is really slick and slithery.
And the cast are interesting and their interactions believable. They make the broader social themes relatable on a personal level. There's wit and zing here.
Sadly, it all falls apart with the plot structure. It just doesn't understand how a zombie horror movie should work. It introduces the parasitic element near the start, then spends most of the movie on the casts social life. A character is murdered early on and, seemingly an eternity later, somebody idly wonders where they've been. By the time the film handbrake turns into the zombie-killing section, I'd stopped caring about it and the film didn't put the effort into explaining the sudden shift into (mild) violence and gore.
Which brings me to the 'action' sequences which are just terrible. Managing to be both basic and unclear, nothing has any weight, sense of drama or threat. Bad, bad, bad.
And there's an attempt to add a meta-narrative through the use of found footage and genre aware characters that falls completely flat. To make this kind of thing work you have to really commit to it. But here it's so half hearted and inconsequential that when it does happen it's jarring to the point I was questioning why I was even watching this.
It brings me no pleasure to dunk on such a small budget indie film. Nobody makes this kind of movie without really caring about what they do and that much is clearly evident here. But sadly I though this was really poor.
Weirdly, this kind of genre movie is usually a case of weird and whacky effects and plot elements holding your interest even though it lacks a decent script or acting. But this is almost the reverse. I'd actually be interested if the film makers dropped all the 'genre' elements and just made a straight up kitchen-sink drama.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. I actually think this may have had a lower budget than The Paragon. Is it possible to have a budget less than zero?
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