Plan Z (2016) Reviews

• Plan A - Y must have been taken.

  TherzThz2016-11-01

  The premise of this movie is pretty basic. At the beginning of a zombie epidemic a photographer sees all the signs and enacts his ZOMBIE PLAN. Not bad. The problem with this film is the low budget and terrible plan. For example he tools up with weapons at the start, but uses random junk around his house. Like a steak knife and a cheap non-industrial crowbar. Then he gets his bug out gear together, and again, it's all junk. So if you're into the survival sub-culture you can pretty much look down on this guy and all his "planning". There is a lot of narration by a super cool and level headed sounding voice. I guess it's supposed to give the audience prompts as to what the main character is going through. But again, his plan is so lousy and ill thought out that I'm left wondering if we should be following someone else instead, like the maybe the narrator himself. There's some action sure, but it's pretty low budget and never feels very tense. The characters are poorly developed as we only start meeting them after 'Z Day', so it's all survivors guilt and anxiety driving the conversations. This movie is really just a poor mans '28 Days Later'. I'd say the redeeming part is the music, it's good during the fight scenes. But after a while the narration becomes tiresome and the blood smeared on everybody's face just looks tacky. It's too much eye rolling for some occasional rock music to save. Just to save you some time; the guys plan is: "Wait at my house for as long as I can, and then go to the country". And that's pretty much the plot. Oh but wait, then the survivors decide they're going to fight back and kill all the zombies right as the movie ends. But they are incapable of doing that so it's a stupid note to end on. Like, if you just bashed a zombies head in with a rock how does that qualify you to kill 40 million zombies? This movie is an unintentional joke. The characters are poorly organised under supplied, unskilled, and virtually unarmed. But the film tries to put them forward as humanities great hope without giving us any real reason to think so. They do what anybody without a plan would do anyway and it shows. 3 out of 10

• Welcome to the end of days...

  paul_haakonsen2016-11-19

  Anything even remotely zombie and it has my attention. However, I can't say that I had any particular hopes to "Plan Z" prior to watching it. I just sat down to watching it and would let it either impress or fail to impress as it would. So what was the verdict? Well, mildly impressed. "Plan Z" certainly did have potential, especially because this takes places during the first stages of a zombie outbreak. And it was done nicely enough in a way that put the audience in the shoes right alongside with Craig (played by Stuart Brennan). However, it was the shoddy and questionable camera work that failed to impress me. And it actually turned into a thing of frustration. I really loathe it when a camera is swinging to and forth all over the place, which often was the case in "Plan Z". But also the sense of a rather shallow storyline helped to steer the movie away from being impressive. The story pretty much just easily strafe over the events of an outbreak and takes you from point A to point B way too fast, letting everything in between just slip through the cracks. And it was as if the characters all lacked background, and they could essentially all have been one and the same character, just equipped with a different face. Very little effort was put into the characters to flesh them out and give them character. Sure it was nice to see how Craig prepared for what was inevitable in the beginning of the movie, but after that, he just became another faceless character like the rest of the characters in the movie. Director Stuart Brennan had some vision, but just seemed to eager to make a movie that showed progression. A lot of details and time to set up a believable story and setting just fell to the floor. I was, however, fairly entertained by the movie as a whole, because it does have some good aspects to it as well. However, as an addition to the zombie genre "Plan Z" just didn't bring anything new or memorable. It just didn't have what it took to play the big league. If you enjoy the zombie genre, as I do, then by all means do take the time to sit down and watch "Plan Z". Just don't expect to be blown away. "Plan Z" lands a five out of ten stars rating from me.

• Funnily Bad

  griffin-881342016-11-18

  Acting, Screenplay, Editing, Make Up. It was all bad. The story is just awful and the characters are pretty much not there. This won some awards but I honestly can't see how. Its like a student movie and I was expecting a lot more than I saw. Its actually quite funny how bad this is. The voice-over is attempting to convince us that this man's 'Plan' make him some sort of survival guru when really his plan is to stay indoors and then go to the countryside when they run out of food. Thats not a plan. There's a part where they leave the house to look for the neighbours car keys. They look inside the house even though the main character saw the neighbours go outside and get eaten trying to get to their car. They would obviously have had the car keys on them when they got eaten! Unless the reason they got eaten was because they forgot the keys! So why are they looking INSIDE the house? There are some weird flashback sequences that don't make sense and randomly injected characters turn up from no where that make little sense and the ending of the 4 of them deciding to kill 40 million zombies is just so unrewarding as a viewer. I'm all for independent cinema but this is just bad. I was laughing at it by the end and wasn't the only one.

• Embarrassingly awful

  tcarty-293672017-07-09

  Right, spoilers, I'm going to rip into this film because its shocking. In every way. It's more like a college project rather than a full on movie production. The lead actor 'Plan Man' i'll call him, delivers such a one-dimensional, boring and one of the most contrived performances I've watched. Frankly, the whole cast are unconvincing and at times irritating. Plan Mans mate shakes like he is in an earthquake. The plan itself is NOT a plan, its just sit down and move when things become untenable. ADR in this film is the worst aspect. The people involved in the recording of the sound need to go back to college to re- learn their job. The sound is muffled at best, poor audio clips pasted in, music constantly plays without pause, the ADR is clearly recorded in post production because the sync is way off and the reverb and echo are polar opposite of what the voices would sound like in the actual scene. Plan Man has ONE tone of voice and its an overly self important serious action man impression. It's all terrible. The last half of the film could be a Renualt advert. You cant hear the voices for the rain. The plot is just bland, predictable and by the numbers. There's nothing nuanced or interesting. Its just typical B movie awful, awkward laziness. They compare themselves to Spartans at the end. Get a grip. You drove a van a hundred miles north, you hardly fended off an army of thousands, you just drove past them. The blood looks like paint. The ending is sequel bait. 'Lets kill all the zombies', right, erm, OK then but your all nervous beyond belief just looking at one so, are you all going to transform into zombie slaying machines overnight? No. You'll all die through naivety and taking yourselves far too seriously, which is what this whole film does Its basically Emmerdale: Day Z There's nothing redeeming about this junk Don't watch this film. Watch Here Alone if you want a good zombie survival film.

• Plan Z Worked for Me

  hunsletramone2016-12-29

  Plan Z is one of the better zombie movies out there , and there is quite a few zombie movies about these days i am glad to say. but not all good though like this one, i liked this zombie film a lot , never got tired of it, a simple but good story , sort of thing i would have done under the same situation , in what the main character was trying to do as in trying to get to the Isle of Skye from Dunfirmline in Scotland as it is less populated so would be safer .And as one reviewer put some lovely scenery up there as seen in the film . Stuart Brennan and Mark Paul Wake played great lead parts, as everyone who acted in this film , not loads of action in the film but enough to sustain it and keep me occupied and happy that i watched Plan Z.