Portrait of a Zombie (Trailer post #16)

"The whole country's sh*te" - so true!

Primarily, Portrait of a Zombie suffers from the same problem that a lot of low budget zombie films tend do - they aim far too high with too scant resources. It was actually excellent to begin with, a fairly sharply written and witty story following a localized infection, but as the movie trundled into it's main act, the attempt to stray outside of what was clearly their comfort zone doomed it with the resulting -and frankly unnecessary within the framework of the story - attempts at portraying a Dublin plagued by Zombie attacks being farcical. It was ridiculously far fetched - even given the fact that it's a movie about zombies - and the whole movie started to fall apart completely from the middle onwards as neither zombie hordes, attacks in the city center, or criminals openly carrying guns on the streets evidently manage to catch the attention of law enforcement.

As a positive, it had promise, and I firmly believe its downfall was not actually a budget issue, but rather a far too ambitious story arc for the budget - had they kept it smaller in scale and confined to the estate the action was mostly set in, jettisoning the wholly unnecessary and rubbish city scenes, it would have been twice the movie it ended up being. Although some of the acting was ropey, the main characters were mostly excellent, and the strength of said acting largely held the film together. Zombie effects ranged from mediocre to decent - the main zombie, about whom the film is largely about, was leagues ahead of the rest of the make up in this regard but the zombie attacks were wholly unconvincing and more or less were, without fail, the classic 'camera lens into the face to signify an incoming zombie', which got old pretty quick. The gore was also quite poor, with one or two decent scenes offset by some incredibly boring, drawn out and surprisingly bloodless death-by-zombie scenes.

The script was, however, pretty decent and putting aside the aforementioned scenes external to the estate in which it's based, was competently written with a good blend of drama and wit that the actors involved served well. One or two excellent lines had the audience laughing.

All in all, what's most disappointing about this movie isn't that it's not really a good one, but with some minor changes in story telling and set pieces it could have very easily been a good one. As it is, it's watchable, and some terrific acting in some lead roles - the parents, brother, and neighbor in particular - holds it together admirably, but it's s shame because I wanted to like it more than I did. I believe with a further edit restricting the action to the estate in which it's based and removing several scenes which ultimately had no bearing on the film other than to cheapen it, the film would benefit hugely - because the makings of an excellent film are there.

As it is I would give it a 4/10.