- Director: Jeff Barnaby
- Writer: Jeff Barnaby
- Stars: Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Forrest Goodluck
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 38 Minutes
Synopsis
We open in the Red Crow Indian Reservation in 1981, where we see a man catching and cleaning fish on the river. He cleans out the guts of one fish, but it won’t stay dead. All the fish come back to life, which isn’t supposed to happen! Credits roll.
We come back with Traylor, the Chief of the Red Crow police, checking out a man’s dying dog; he shoots the dog to put it out of his misery. He then heads over to his ex-wife Joss’s house. She explains that Joseph, their son, got arrested again, and he needs to go to town and get him out.
There’s a call about a drunk white guy eating a man’s chickens. He also is told to go visit his father, and it turns out his father is the man with the undead fish. Traylor’s never seen anything like that. Then he finds the dead dog in his trunk is up and active as well. The two men burn the fish and the dog.
Meanwhile, the guy in the cell next to Joseph is puking up blood. The policeman in charge is coughing too. The prisoner attacks the cop and Traylor, and they beat him to death. Except he’s still not dead. Joseph is bitten.
Joseph goes to see his girlfriend, Charlie, who is pregnant. He goes to the hospital for a tetanus shot, but they’re all out; they’ve been getting a lot of bites there all of a sudden. Joss, who is a nurse, hears arguing and checks it out. It’s zombies.
Taylor checks out a domestic dispute, but the man is high on coke, and the wife is a zombie in the process of eating their baby. She bites Traylor and they fight. They head to the hospital, but they meet Joss coming back from there. It’s a full-scale zombie apocalypse, and they don’t want to head into the city.
Six months later, The world has mostly been wiped out. The people from the Mi’gmaq reservation are immune, but no one else seems to be; the native characters who have been bitten are fine. They let healthy survivor non-native people into their compound, but not the sick. It might be the last place on the planet that isn’t overrun.
We see Traylor with his shirt off, and he’s been bitten dozens of times. The bite-marks are everywhere, but he’s immune, so he survives.
There’s a party scene with lot of fairly boring drama between Joseph and Lysol about how worthless their family is. At least until a girl zombie bites off Lysol’s penis and things pick up again.
Meanwhile, Traylor, his father, and a deputy go “hunting” to clean out a building of zombies. Lysol goes nuts and stabs Joseph. He sets the zombie girl loose in the camp to eat the newcomers and then things start getting away from the heroes as the infection quickly spreads inside. Of course, Charlie goes into labor in the middle of the battle. Before long, there’s not much left.
Commentary
The acting in this isn’t great, especially the dialog. All the dialog sounds very artificial. Still, the concept is really good, and the setting is what makes the film unique. There are a couple of scenes that are purely animated, and they were really cool, but the film could have used a few more of these shots; as it was they were odd enough that they felt distracting.
The worst part is that everything was under control until the troublemaker Lysol decided to kill all his own people for essentially no reason.
I guess the moral of the story is that, “white people are a curse on the land.” This is probably not a new idea for Native Americans, but it’s a bit more literal this time around.