THE HORDE

After the discovery of a police officer's corpse, his colleagues decide to take justice into their own hands and break into a building in the Parisian suburbs, covered by balaclavas and armed to the teeth. The raid goes wrong, and the group of police officers is immediately taken prisoner by Marco D.'s gang. Meanwhile, Paris seems to be under attack: smoke and flames rise on the horizon, and inexplicably, the dead begin to come back to life. Now, the avenging policemen and the criminals are forced to unite against a common threat that comes from beyond! Some time ago, while talking about "Survival of the Dead" by Romero, I praised its originality while criticizing the wave of clones that, year after year, rise from their tombs mimicking the Master's political subtexts and adding "of the Dead" to the end of the title. Well, it's time to make the inevitable exception to the axiom then postulated, and the push comes from France with "The Horde". The zombie movie by the debutant duo Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher is the antithesis of originality; it presents a situation already seen elsewhere (it has a lot of the bad "City of the Dead", but you can also sense our "Demon" and the Iberian "Rec") and fairly standardized characters. The action takes precedence over suspense, and bla, bla, bla, it's a carefree entertainment, as they say. But then why is "The Horde" an absolutely must-see film? "The Horde" is the authenticity of horror on celluloid; it's the fun, the emotional involvement, it's pure spectacle for lovers of splatter and ultraviolent comic book action. "The Horde" grabs you from the first scene and doesn't let go until the credits roll. Although originality is not the strong point of Dahan and Rocher's film, as previously mentioned, there are also no real attempts at plagiarism, citations, or tributes: "The Horde" goes its own way from the start and takes only a handful of minutes to get to the point. The initial approach is close to the modern French polar, a crime drama, therefore, that promises shootouts and hard-boiled adrenaline. The location and situational context also evoke new French cinema, with the suburbs as the home of crime, a lot of degradation, and the law of the strongest ruling. After a few minutes, not even enough time to properly introduce all the characters, the unusual makes its appearance this time in the form of the living dead. The dear angry and cancerous zombies that seem so far from the French cinematic tradition, except for some Rollin-like incursions in the 1970s and 1980s. The sudden and unexpected shift from action polar to splatter horror is handled with great naturalness, throwing the viewer into the midst of events without providing any explanation: the viewer's point of view is the same as that of the characters, and what happens is a mystery, almost in real time. Only some smoke coming from the Parisian horizon can make us assume that the epidemic has taken hold in the capital, but this time government experiments, voodoo curses, meteorites, and toxic fumes are all and nothing in a situation that concentrates the only interest on the survival of a small group of opposing ideals destined for collaboration. And we all know how difficult it is in a horror film to maintain team spirit and collaborate, let alone if there are two rival factions like criminals and resentful policemen! The characters on the scene mostly follow the rules that genre cinema has taught us, so there is no shortage of the good guy ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the group and the bastard who, cornered, is ready to betray. But among the clichés, there are also original characters like the old madman armed with a machine gun, zombie rapist, and ready to snort cocaine, or the masculine policewoman with unpredictable behavior. Unpredictable is, however, the adjective that best suits the itinerary of the various characters, sometimes indecipherable regarding their intentions and in general difficult to place in an ideal prognosis on "who will survive". "The Horde" is dotted with cult scenes: from the attack of the first hooded zombie to the kitchen fight, from the attempted rape of the living dead to the long survival attempt on the roof of the car in the garage, passing practically through every scene that features the old madman played by Yves Pignot. Noteworthy is the high level of brute violence - with shootouts and hand-to-hand combat - and an abundant shower of blood that soaks the characters from the start. With "The Horde", we are dealing with a damned fun film, rich in rhythm and anthology finds; a must-see title in an ideal top 5 of the best zombie movies of the new millennium. Vive la France!