Zombie Ferox

In recent years, Zombie movies with handheld cameras have become big business, and Jonathon Ash’s “Zombie Ferox”, filmed in 2001, seemed to arrive before the beginning of that fad — before all the zombie insanity really caught hold, Considering that Ash’s previous effort, “Nightmare of the Living Dead”, was also about zombies, it’s easy to surmise that he has more than a passing interest in the Living Dead, and in last couple of years, he’s sought to transfer that interest into a few movies. “Zombie Ferox” is, of course, one of those films.

This movie not only has the dubious-virtue of being the first video tape I ever ordered online, this was way back in the VHS days when this movie was a rarity, I purchased my copy from DEAD UNDERGROUND, which was, at the time, one of the best and most well known sites for ordering dup copies of rare, out-of-print and foreign import movies, Don’t bother searching for it, it’s not there anymore, Most of the sites I used to order from back in the VHS days LIKE Midnight Movies, Video Mayhem, Video in the Hole, Blackest Heart Cinema, Midnight Video, Underground indie, are no longer with us, The DVD revolution and all the releases of old titles on DVD, as well as the coming of Peer to Peer file sharing like Bit Torrent and broadband Internet connections put the damper on the need for such sites.
The story involves a Doctor Fogger somewhere in England turning all the employees into Zombies. The government, or whoever, know what the Doctor is up but don’t give a damn, and the Zombies break loose from deep underground wreaking havoc.

As zombies go, they are a nasty uneven group, some look really good, but others are just cheap dollar store make-up, It seems as each character in this movie are introduced out of nowhere just to be killed by the zombies, the acting is simply terrible in some scenes, but most people looking to watch indie zombies movies are not looking for Hollywood drama, OK so the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but this is zombieland, where movies like Zombi 2, City of the Living Dead and many other work very little story behind them.

The mind behind this Ferox is one JONATHON ASH, and again he not a stranger to zombie films having made several previous efforts in the zombie genre, and after seeing this film, I’d love to see some of his previous released masterpieces, and considering obvious budget limitations this turned out to be a watchable flick, even if not for the reasons intended, there are several releases of this movie out there, the current release on VHS which is available at Amazon has a listed run time of 72 minutes, The version which I am reviewing is an out of production Canadian VHS release from Blue-Light-Media which is listed as 75 minutes, but that may just be down to the PAL/NTSC frame rate issues.

Zombie Ferox