Canada. 2015.
Crew
Director – Cody Calahan, Screenplay – Chad Archibald, Cody Calahan & Jeff Maher, Producers – Chad Archibald, Cody Calahan & Christopher Giroux, Photography – Jeff Maher, Music – Stephanie Copeland, Visual Effects – Flook FX (Supervisor – Nick Flook), Production Design – Jay Pooley. Production Company – Breakthrough Entertainment/Black Fawn Films.
Cast
Michelle Mylett (Sam), Stephen Bogaert (Max), Josette Halpert (Bean), Samuel Farace (Jacob)
Plot
The Red Room Virus has caused the complete breakdown of society. Sam wanders the ruins. She was pregnant and gave birth to a child but this was taken away by a woman who aided her in giving birth. Sam meets a young girl Beatrice or Bean, who is fleeing from her father, a military officer. They are then captured by soldiers and taken to a facility run by Max, Bean’s father. There Sam is subjected to a series of experiments in how long she can be exposed to the Red Room Virus before it affects her. At the same time, Max in holding prisoner and conducting experiments with a boy Jacob who has incredible powers.
Cody Calahan is a Canadian director whose work has all been in the horror genre. After several other works as a producer, Calahan made his directorial debut with the social media zombies film Antisocial (2012). Subsequent to this, he went on to make the evil twin film Let Her Out (2016), The Oak Room (2020) and Vicious Fun (2020). In between this, Calahan has also produced a number of other genre films with the likes of Sweet Karma (2009), Exit Humanity (2011), Monster Brawl (2011), Septic Man (2013), Ejecta (2014), Hellmouth (2014), Bite (2015), The Sublet (2015), Bed of the Dead (2016), The Heretics (2017), I’ll Take Your Dead (2018) and Death Valley (2021).
Antisocial gained a reasonable following. It offered a mix of traditional Zombie Film while jumping aboard new social media trends of the day – the infection was spread by people logging onto a Facebook-like site. What became a word of mouth talking point with the film was some very gory scenes, including people pushing power drills into their own head. It has been the most high-profile of Cody Calahan’s films to date, so it is no surprise that he immediately returned to the material with a sequel here.
As Antisocial 2 opens, we seem to have skipped forward a few years from the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse to the full-on collapse of civilisation. In this respect, Calahan gives us standard scenes of the aftermath, although this never goes any further beyond shooting locations around what look like an abandoned factory. This is notable as one Post-Apocalyptic film where there is almost nothing in the way of the quest for survival, the search for supplies etc, nothing more than the odd scene where Michelle Mylett is fleeing the infected.
The scenes where Michelle Mylett and young Josette Halpert travel on together look promising – the adult and adopted kid travelling companion is a reliable cinematic standard – but this only lasts a couple of scenes. In fact, Cody Calahan seems to display very little interest in his post-apocalyptic world.
There is precious little that is original or imaginative about Antisocial 2. I did like one scene where Michelle Mylett and Josette Halpert are holed up in a warehouse as the zombies come after them and Josette is able to ping a location into the mapping app and abruptly cause the zombies to run off distracted. However, like the previous film, Cody Calahan never does much to make the whole social media zombies concept believable. It leaves you feeling that the first film was carried by the novelty of the concept but that it had zero substance to be able to be spun out as a series.
Antisocial 2 is disappointingly routine in all areas. It is especially disappointing when placed up against its predecessor. What you expect it to do is deliver more deranged gore-drenched scenes with people putting power drills up to their heads but it goes in completely different directions and spends most of its time focused around sinister experiments where we are not sure what is going on for a long time. Even at the denouement, it is really no surprise to guess the identity of who the mysterious gifted boy being kept prisoner is.
Trailer here