Director – Kiah Roache-Turner, Screenplay – Kiah Roache-Turner & Tristan Roache-Turner, Producers – Blake Northfield & Tristan Roache-Turner, Photography – Tim Nagle, Music – Michael Lira, Visual Effects Supervisor – Christian J. Heinrich, Special Effects/Makeup Effects Designer – Mariel McClorey, Cyborg Zombie – Make-Ep Effects Group (Supervisors – Paul Kattie & Nick Nicolaou), Special Effects Supervisors – Tim Namour & Stefan Whyte, Production Design – Esther Rosenberg. Production Company – Screen Australia/Create NSW/Apostle Digital/Bronte Pictures/Guerrilla Films.
Cast
Luke McKenzie (Rhys), Shantae Barnes-Cowan (Maxi), Jake Ryan (The Colonel), Tasia Zalar (Grace), Bianca Brady (Brooke), Jay Gallagher (Barry), Nick Boshier (The Surgeon General)
Plot
Following the zombie apocalypse, Rhys maintains life on his own in a compound where he has harnessed zombies to work for him. He spends his time capturing humans and delivering them to The Colonel and The Surgeon General who are conducting experiments to come up with a cure for the zombie infection. After capturing the human-zombie hybrid Grace and delivering her to them, Rhys is taken prisoner at gunpoint by Grace’s sister Maxi. During the course of this, Rhys discovers that where he had been told he was providing subjects for experiments that the people he captures are in fact being killed to form a temporary cure.
Australian brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner operate as a production team with Kiah as director, Tristan as producer and both as scriptwriters. They had a modest festival hit with the zombie film Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014). The two next went on to make Nekrotronic (2018) about demon hunters, before returning to follow up their previous success with Wyrmwood: Apocalypse here, followed by the subsequent giant spider film Sting (2024).
The Roache-Tuners had a culty hit with Wyrmwood. I wasn’t as big a fan of it as some people were but clearly there existed enough of a fanbase to warrant this sequel. Here the Roache-Turners reunite with several of the actors from the first film – Luke McKenzie, Bianca Bradey and Jay Gallagher – and appear to have more of a budget to hand.
It feels with Wyrmwood: Apocalypse that Kiah Roache-Turner has refined the basics of the original and is making more of the film he wanted to do. There is an appealing opening sequence where we visit Luke McKenzie’s compound where we see him with zombies imprisoned peddling on an exercyle to water his garden, other imprisoned to harness their breath for fuel, while he tosses chunks of cooked flesh over the gate to distract those outside every time he wants to go in and out. There are other comic-bookish touches such as McKenzie’s vehicle running out of gas and he having to stop and capture a zombie and then wrestle it inside a drawer on the back of the truck imprisoned with attached gas mask so that he can continue on.
(l to r) Jake Ryan, Tasia Zalar and Luke McKenzie
As with the first film, there are some rather far-fetched ideas at play. Like the idea of zombie breath being used as a fuel substitute. Or simply the fact that Luke McKenzie has been delivering human prisoners he captures to The Surgeon General without any clues that they are being use for diabolical experiments, or even that he would be given a set of pills to hold back the zombie infection without any idea of what they do.
Kiah Roache-Turner has stripped the film away of almost all plot elements and it exists in terms of the visually kinetic – all action, splatter and absurd effects delivered in vivid splashes of colour. When dialogue comes, it feels as though it should be in comic-book balloons. It is all maintained at a madcap level of energy that you have to applaud – one that reminds a good deal of early Sam Raimi around the time of The Evil Dead (1981). The film arrives at a ferociously entertaining all-out climax.
