Reign of Chaos (2021) poster

Reign of Chaos (2021)

Rating:


UK. 2021.

Crew

Director – Rebecca J. Matthews, Screenplay – Tom Jolliffe, Producers – Scott Jeffrey & Rebecca J. Matthews, Photography – Ben Collin, Music – Rachel Shuttleworth, Makeup Effects – Brodie Mayhew, Production Design – Maria D’Arcy. Production Company – Proportion Productions.

Cast

Rebecca Finch (Nicole), Peter Cosgrove (Rhodri), Rita Di Tuccio (Alina), Georgia Wood (Lindsay), Mark Sears (God of Chaos), Du’aine Samuels (Gavin)


Plot

Society has collapsed with the rise of the zombie-like Joiners. In the burning ruins of London, three girls, Nicole, Alina and Lindsay, are recruited by Rhodri. They are told that they are daughters of goddesses and that they have the powers to defeat the Gods of Chaos. Rhodri puts the girls through a training regimen and readies them for the coming battle.


Rebecca J. Matthews is a British director and producer within the horror field. Her films as director include Pet Graveyard (2019), The Watcher 2 (2019), The Candy Witch (2020), Witches of Amityville Academy (2020), Bats: The Awakening (2021), Cannibal Troll (2021), Hatched (2021), HellKat (2021), Beneath the Surface (2022) and Exorcist Vengeance (2022), many of which are co-directed with Scott Jeffrey. She has also produced a sizeable body of other low-budget genre films.

Reign of Chaos is a film I had difficulty getting a grasp on. The opening tosses up epic ideas about battling deities and chaos, while the setting is the world in the aftermath of some type of apocalypse that has been overrun by what are zombies in all but name. The script trades in pretentious sounding phrases like ‘the blood of Zeus’, ‘forces of chaos’, ‘daughters of goddesses’. There’s an initial wildness to it that seems epic in nature but it becomes more a case of a film taking a far bigger conceptual bite that it has the budget to pull such off.

The three daughters of goddesses - Alina (Rita Di Tuccio), Nicole (Rebecca Finch) and Lindsay (Georgia Wood) in Reign of Chaos (2021)
The three daughters of goddesses – (l to r) Alina (Rita Di Tuccio), Nicole (Rebecca Finch) and Lindsay (Georgia Wood)

When it comes down to it, the film is let down by its cheapness. For all its epic showdown between the forces of good and chaos, the settings are never more than a couple of parks and back alleys in London. The destruction of society is shown in some very cheap opticals of the city burning and the London Eye destroyed. And the action comes down to nothing more than the girls strutting towards the camera with intent, kicking a few zombies around and releasing some animated blasts.

The girls are okay and quite professional in their performances. The oddity among the cast is Peter Cosgrove as the guru Rhodri who gives his entire performance through a hoarse whisper that sounds as fake as anything. The worst of the performances is from Du’aine Samuels who comes across as an amateur, not to mention has some of the most ridiculous of the dialogue: “Three goddesses in my basement? How am I going to explain this to my wife?”


Trailer here


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