In 2010 I heard a British zombie film entitled The Devil’s Playground was in the works. Well when I hear zombie film that doesn’t always mean much these days. I hear about a lot of zombie films, many are never completed, many don’t live up to their potential, so that doesn’t always excite me. What DID excite me had nothing to do with the director, Mark McQueen, because honestly I hadn’t seen any of his work until this point. Nor was I excited that it was going to be written by Bart Ruspoli as he had only written shorts that I had not seen until this point (though I did enjoy his acting in Band of Brothers and Rome.) What I WAS excited was that it was an action zombie film with Danny Dyer! The fact that Sean Pertwee(who we later find out is only in the film for almost no time whatsoever), MyAnna Buring, Craig Fairbrass, and the ever luscious Jaime Murray were also starring was also a plus.
SO with the cast being so well put together for an action zombie film it clearly has to be an instant success right? Well let me ask you something, honestly, how many of you have heard of the movie prior to this review? Or better yet how many of you have friends that have heard of it? The number is going to be pretty damn low and there’s a reason for that. First though let’s go over the movie itself shall we?
The film begins with a solid idea that there is a new performance-enhancing drug being tested across the UK. It’s going well too – well until all of the test subjects start to die on them. Which isn’t that bad until you first factor in that there are 29,000 test subjects. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen (that’s the company’s concern) but the real problem is none of these people are STAYING dead. Yes, zombies arise in the UK from drug testing and it’s a completely original concept (since the Rage Virus in 28 Days Later doesn’t produce zombies.)
We quickly move to follow one of the employees of Newgen (the company performing the tests) as he strives to find the one test subject who is not infected – hoping they can use her to create a cure. The employee is…. not Dryer who I originally thought would be the main character in the film and actually ended up being Craig Fairbrass’s character. That’s fine – he actually did a great job with what was written for him but Jamie Murray and Dryer really received pretty stunted roles they couldn’t do much with and while it was good to see Sean Pertwee in the film he was off screen almost as quickly as he showed up.
At any rate Joe (Fairbrass) realizes he’s got too much blood on his hands from cleaning up after Newgen and wants to do the right thing. He wants to help recover the girl to have a cure made, not for the company but for humanity. On his way out the door he’s bitten and finds 3 ‘stabilizers’ which are going to keep the zombie virus from taking him over for a little bit – but it won’t be forever.
Don’t get me wrong – the action sequences were good. We had fast zombies (yes I prefer slow ones) causing a menace trying to slow down our characters from getting to their goal of safety but the fight and running scenes were just done well – they just weren’t done enough (and you didn’t care about the characters enough) to feel any suspense.
There’s a lot of gore, a lot of great shots, and a lot of roles that were cast well but just from a lack of dialogue and proper situations did not give the actors a real chance to shine. I’m more than a bit let down by this one as I loved the cast but I just could not love the film.
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