It Stains the Sands Red - movie review

The zombie movie has become a cinema in its own right. Zombie Nazis (Dead Snow), romantic zombies (Warm Bodies), comic zombies (Shaun of the Dead), we always feel that the genre is out of breath, overexploited, until we discover the nugget that gives us hope. A hope responding to the sweet evocative name of It Stains The Sands Red. Between The Walking Dead and Alone in the World.

THE TALKING DEAD :

The zombie is a political beast. With Night of the Undead, Romero showed us that with horror, as with humor, we could denounce by absurdity to better comamner the faults of a sick society. From a civilized culture, the undead returns us logically to the Stone Age where human relations tutoyed the bestial. Freed from all castrating social rules, Man becomes once again a predator, where only the law of the strongest prevails. Before becoming an umpteenth commercial machine, the burial profaner was therefore an invention destined to frighten but also pushed to some form of reflection. That we thought dead and entered as the creature may be. To be better reborn from its ashes

A romance like no other.

Yet another zombie movie. Except that not. It Stains the Red Sands is not just a zombie movie. We would rather be in the vein of John Hillcoat's Road than in that of Snyder's Army of the Dead. The film frees itself from all the rest of the genre by offering us a painful way of the cross for our heroine in perdition, who is redeemed from his sins during his journey in the sand hell that his director draws us.

The pitch is nevertheless of a simplicity post-it in form but of a much more subtle intelligence on the bottom: Molly, thirty-year-old paulée left bogged down in the Californian desert in the company of her beauf of boyfriend. During their road trip and following an unfortunate stop in this sandblasted nightmare, the gentleman finds himself suddenly assaulted by a zombie out of nowhere. With no choice but to flee for her life, the girl then begins a long hike or walk, followed by her new companion decided to make it her four hour

He has eyes revolver, he has the look that kills, he has eaten you first

ZOMBISYPSYCHOTERAPIE :

In a closed door that stretches as far as the eye can see, Molly will find herself in spite of herself a victim of a pseudo Stockholm Syndrome where her torturer will prove to be her best friend, her confidant, her shrink, the gargoyle by Which our fisherman will be able to expiate his faults. An ambiguous relationship will then arise between the two protagonists, mingled with hatred and affection to offer an unexpected redemption for our peroxidized blonde. An initiatory journey towards the path of wisdom through which our superficial bimbo will gradually turn into a woman. The way of maturity somehow. Juggling between scenes deliberately sinking in the absurd to rock on really touching sequences, all masterfully interpreted by Brittany Allen. The Canadian actress (soon in Jigsaw) is of all plans, literally wears the film on her solid shoulders. A quasi-biblical Calvary, in which one discovers that our young blonde suffers from a dark past, mingled with vices, unpardoned faults and whose trial that awaited could finally redeem her of her missed acts.

Brittany Ellen,Revelation of the movie

Directed by Colin Minihan, to whom we owe Grave Encounters especially released on DVD in the Hexagon, the filmmaker realizes here a real tour de force. Forget the guns fights of Walking Dead, the denunciation of a time consuming consumer society of Romero's Night of the Undead, where salvation can sometimes come where it is least expected.

The enemy is rarely the one we believe

It Stains the Sand Red is unclassifiable. Oscillating between burlesque scenes, pure horror trash and comedy of manners, the film brews all genres for a hybrid cocktail that never really knows where to stow. And that's the rub. To type in all the registers, the film can sometimes lose credibility and disorient the spectator little warned on the filmic object that he is discovering.

A loss of cinephiles that paradoxically makes all its charm, especially in our ultra-standardized society where everything has to be labeled, categorized for precisely not to rush the viewer, too accustomed to be brushed in the sense of the hair. The result is an imperfect film, leaded sometimes by a lack of rhythm but whose desire to emerge from the bonds of an ultra-saturated kind is a rare artistic honesty for a young director not even 35 years old.

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