A forestry company experiment genetically on trees in order to increase logging yield. But the experiment goes wrong, and suddenly a group of loggers and environmental activist are all turned into zombies. The boss for the forestry company's son travels to the remote section in a forest where the workers are to see why the production has stopped. There he stumbles upon hordes of zombies, but even some people who are still human, and together they have to make it out alive, and try to stop the zombie disaster.
I was afraid I was in for yet another new stupid low-budget horror film, with bad acting, directing and again, especially bad acting. I can live with an unoriginal story as it's truly hard to be a hundred percent original these days, but when the acting is horrible, everything becomes horrible, something that loads of new horror movies have had over the past few years. But to my big surprise, the acting here was good. Well, there were maybe one or two bad seeds, but the overall impression came out much better than your normal new low-budget horror flick. I had no problem with any of the actors or their performances whatsoever, and so it made the whole movie look a hell of a lot better.
Severed is a zombie flick, and is not the least bit original but it doesn't really matter as I found it to be entertaining and fast-paced. The pacing alone, with a lot of action and gore sequences all throughout the movie, never really made you loose interest at all. So even if it's not original (like most new horror flicks these days), it had these things going for it, and it truly made a difference.
The zombies were like your 'normal' kind of zombies, nasty and flesh-eating. They were not those typical super slow boring zombies that one could easily run away from, but were not super speedy either. Anyway, it worked quite well with the zombies, and this movie is actually a good choise if you wanna see a new zombie flick that doesn't completely suck.
For a low-budget film it looks pretty good and I have absolutely no complaints about how it looks. What I have to complain about though, was the camera-work at times which brought everything down quite a bit to be honest. Almost every time there were some action/gory scenes, the camera went completely spastic, and was all over the place. It was not as bad as it may sound at all times, but a lot of times it actually was. There's some visible blood splatter and some gore, but it felt like a lot of it was taken out of sight since the camera refused to focus on one spot at the time during these scenes.
Why watch a zombie flick? Well, it might be for a few different reasons but one big reason is naturally for the gore, and when that is somewhat taken away, it doesn't make such a great experience after all. Now, don't get me completely wrong here, you're still to see a lot of splatter and such stuff, but the camera-work is truly irritating at times and that is always a big negative thing. But for a new zombie flick, Severed is actually quite worth seeing for the reasons mentioned earlier, as well as for some of the visible gore and splatter.
I was expecting trash, and while I didn't strike gold, I'm still happy that I watched Severed and that I got something out from watching it as well. It has its problems, but at the same time it has many things going for it, and even if it was far from being great, I would still like to recommend it to zombie fans.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Clearing
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Carl Bessai
WRITING CREDITS: Carl Bessai, Travis McDonald
GENRE: Horror, Zombie
CAST: Sarah Lind, JR Bourne, Sage Brocklebank
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 92 min
RATING: 6/10
Severed Website/IMDB Click here
Severed Trailer Click here
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