Extinction: The G.M.O. Chronicles (2011)

not a terrible movie by any means, but it does have its flaws and plot holes. you really expect me to believe that a person can survive for 16 days by just eating toilet paper? highly unlikely, i doubt it has much nutritional value, if any.the movie starts out well enough, but soon devolves into nonsense with several different types of zombie, and towards the latter half of the movie, the zombies suddenly develop parkour skills and start wearing hoodies!!! there is also a lot of sexual tension between the main male and female leads that never leads anywhere, leading me to wonder why they bothered including it

A loan man survives a zombie-like outbreak and finds the perfect hiding place, a military compound.Extinction successfully borrows and merges from the best trying to appease all walks of zombie fans, there's slow walking, fasting running, hibernating, green and red blooded infected. It's dark, gloomy with the solid cinematography, a muted colour palette and style reminiscent of 28 Days/Weeks Later and Mutants to name a few. Thanks to a minimalist script the acting for the most part is pretty naturalistic. The mix of different foreign English accents gives it a worldwide edge. The story works with the initial military base set up where Tom Keller sets up home, what follows is an exposition flashback then flash forward back to the present. There's voice over narration by actor Daniel Buder who plays Keller who also makes diary logs to a web-cam throughout. Tobias Kay is particularly notable as laid back Max Fischer and the supporting cast including Luise Bähr's Sattler and sharp shooting Lee Rychter as Luke who are all effective enough. With some good effects and a complementary score it then takes a different direction when Keller finds other survivors, brings them back to the base and they then try to get to a bunker. There's not as much tension as it could have but it blows away most modest budget zombie films. Director Niki Drozdowski offers a well made zombie drama with some good action setups and periodic fighting scenes on the doom and gloom atmospheric backdrop. It's a solid serious entry to the genre and although it breaks no new ground and can be a little sluggish its one of better zombie films doing the rounds.

This is the kind of movie you will enjoy with a couple of B movie lover friends; many laughs are guaranteed. The film itself it is really bad and if you are not ready to make fun of it I would advise to stay away.The acting is horrible, maybe because almost all the actors are German but the movie was filmed in English, I found that a bit irritating and some vocabulary kind of odd ("high temperature milk"???) It is not all the actors' fault, we have to give some credit to the scriptwriters, they manage to make dialogs so simple and foreseeable that a 6 days old retarded turtle would understand and expect. It is worth to mention that at least they succeeded introducing all expected elements: a hero who does not want to be a hero, an annoying guy who you want him to die, a love story, a secret, a family disappointment, crazy cult.. you name it. Is that all? Not by far. This must be one of the apocalyptic movies where all the characters have their nice clean clothes and fresh and neat looks, not to mention that all the vehicles passed through the car wash before they are put in front the of camera. 2 starts because you can enjoy many drinks with your friends talking about it.*** Spoiler*** I must mention my favorite two scenes, the ones I laughed at the most:1. When the American guy gets shot. In a zombie land a stranger breaks into your house and shoots one of your people, what is the normal reaction? According to the movie is asking "who are you?" and suffer quietly. The shot guy does not complain or cry of pain and his daughter does not go insane; every one is very civilized except the annoying husband (who you know will eventually die and cannot wait for it to happen). By the way, where the hell got he shot? Because it is amazing how he recovers with a couple of tablets.2. When they open the cell in the police station. This whole scene is priceless. We have a prisoner left alone for 16 days who does not know what is going on. There are many questions about this scenario because the cell has a window (you can see the light coming in) and the door, even though is solid (are all police station cells in Germany for solitary confinement) I guess is not sound proof. So, the ready-to-go- to-anti-IMF-demonstration guy did not hear a thing of the zombie rampage outside? But let's leave that and move to the actual scene: the door opens and there is guy sitting in a bunk like waiting to leave, his first observation is that his saviors are not policemen and after 16 days without eating (and a 3 days beard) he calmly ask for a cigarette. It turns out he survived by eating toilet paper which brings to obvious points: toilet paper is edible and nutritious enough not to loose your body mass and that cell was used as the toilet paper storage for the whole police station.You can comment about those two scenes for hours and, good news, there are so many others (hey a brought fresh hunted deer but the blonde finally got a bit of paint and made three lines in a wall after trying for days with different materials, let's celebrate her achievement!!!!). *** Spoiler***

"Extinction: The G.M.O. Chronicles" isn't exactly a bad movie, but neither is it a really great movie. For a zombie movie, it had an unfortunate tendency of dragging out in long, slow moments, which really weighed heavily on the movie.Story-wise, then "Extinction: The G.M.O. Chronicles" is fairly average. A small group of survivors come together in the face of a worldwide threat of extinction as the dead return to life to eat the flesh of the living.It is the visuals and the cinematography that keeps the movie interesting, but it just barely does so. There are times where the movie just drags on forever and ever without really getting anywhere, and you start to get bored and frustrated with the lack of pace in the movie.The characters in the movie were somewhat one dimensional and you never really got to get properly acquainted with the characters, as they either had too little time to expand or they were just given poor dialogue and script to work with. And as such, then the characters in the movie came off as generic and uninspiring as a whole.I watch a lot of zombie movies, and most of them are not brandishing million dollar budgets. "Extinction: The G.M.O. Chronicles" is actually a good production, but it is just suffering from a poorly executed story and one dimensional characters.And also for a German produced movie, why were everyone there speaking English? Sure they had that thick, telltale German accent, but still, it would have had a more meaningful punch to the story if they had spoken in German, the nations native language. And there are actually some better German zombie movies available on the market - if you don't mind non-English language movies."Extinction: The G.M.O. Chronicles" had potential, but unfortunately it had things working against it which eventually managed to pull it under water and make the movie less enjoyable. I've seen worse low budget zombie movies, but this movie just ended up being uninspiring, less than interesting and too slow.