As always, remember that all reviews are highly subjective and reflect personal opinions and unique tastes. Ultimately, the review is just my highly unprofessional take.
13 Eerie is a Canadian horror film directed by Lowell Dean, the director behind WolfCop, and a zombie movie that flew under my radar this year, Die Alone. The cast features, among others, Katherine Isabelle, Michael Shanks, and Brendan Fehr. In short, the movie is about six forensic science students staying at an abandoned prison site for a practical exam.
The students are tasked with examining corpses placed around the site made to mimic real-world crime scene investigations. After the group has split up into teams and gone their separate ways, it immediately becomes clear it will be one of -those- movies. You know, the kind that goes something like, “Ah shit, did you see that, Gary? Nah Ted, you’re just imagining things”. Incidents will keep escalating, and the characters will be completely oblivious until it’s too late.
The characters are just blank slates, and there is no depth to them. They could not be more interchangable. We don’t get to know anything about them, and as a result, we don’t care about them. They’re just meat mannequins all waiting for their mauling scenes.
Speaking of gore, the practical effects are actually good. I don’t care much for the zombie designs though, as they just look like your average zombie mutant with the default monster sounds.
The decisions made by the characters in the movie are horrible. There are three scenes especially that bothered me.
There is this woman, Kate, who gets chased by a zombie, and she makes her way through a not-so-impressive thicket that scratches her arm once to show the viewers that, you know, they’re more dangerous than the zombie chasing her, I guess. Then, from nowhere, Kate gets her hand stuck between two branches, and instead of taking a split second to pull her hand out, she somehow trips and just lays there waiting for the zombie. I kid you not. The zombie then walks up to her and very, very carefully bites one of her fingernails off before starting to indulge like a normal zombie.
Damn, I guess it’s over 🤷
There is this other scene where another woman, Megan, fights the now zombified Kate. She tries all kinds of violence against her, but finally knocks Zombie Kate out by tipping a shelf over her. Alas, it doesn’t end there. As Zombie Kate wakes up a few scenes later, Megan nails her to the wall with a tool through her mouth. As she releases the grip, another zombie bursts through the floor with its arms flailing around (this is an important detail). She pours acid over him, which seems to just piss him off. She then picks up a small wooden board, puts a foot on its arm, and attempts to take its head off with some sawing motions. While this is happening, Zombie Kate gets loose. But it’s alright, as Megan picks up the long, pointy stake lying on the floor next to her and rams it through Zombie Kate’s head. As the zombie falls to the ground and finally closes its eyes as it bids this cruel world farewell, do you think Megan will use the same tactic on the other zombie who will get up from the hole in the floor anytime n—actually, nevermind, he’s stuck in the floor like a scooby-doo cartoon villain now.
This is perfect; Megan can take her time to aim the stake at its... nope, she is over there concocting something chemical that she splits into two separate glass containers. She then proceeds to escape through a hatch in the ceiling. After Megan has reached safety on the roof, the zombie finally gets up from the hole and starts climbing while Megan is waiting. Once in reach, she shoves one of the glass containers down the zombie’s throat, and then she drops the other glass container from some distance into the first one, breaking it and causing a chemical reaction that goes boom. This is such a convoluted solution to her problem that I could not believe what I was seeing.
Another unbelievable scene, albeit somewhat realistic, was the scene with Megan and her boyfriend Daniel, and a zombie is casually walking up behind him in the background, not sneaking, not pouncing, not anywhere near close. The boyfriend turns around and... throws his hammer at the zombie once it charges, but misses? I don’t know. He is then shot in the back by Megan because she has no semblance of accuracy or risk assessment skills. Even the zombie looks confused as Daniel falls to the ground. Luckily she manages to find a headshot as the zombie is bending down to take a bite out of Daniel.
The movie is a mess. There’s no explaining the original zombies except that there was some biological testing on prisoners, I guess. The conditions as to how one turns into a zombie were also unclear. There was also this black goo that was shown once but never explained or mentioned again.
The ending was abrupt but actually not unexpected. The survivors stop a driver, who turns out to be an old prison guard. After a zombie shows up and the driver is getting his face chewed off, the gang tries to escape in their new car, only to find the car keys dangling in the mouth of the zombie. End Scene. That’s how the movie ends.
It’s not the worst movie out there, and it can be a fun movie to put on during a movie night with some friends. But don’t expect anything serious, emotional, or ground-breaking. If it had any character depth, I could see myself giving it a 5/10 or 6/10. But for now, it gets a 4.5/10 on the zombie movie scale.