Review of Colin

Colin (2008)
2/10
Colin gives me hope that I too can sell my home movies.
8 August 2010
Warning: Spoilers
Colin is set in London where a mysterious virus has been been bringing the dead back to life as flesh eating zombies, the city is in disarray & panic. Colin (Alastair Kirton) is an ordinary bloke, unfortunately Colin's been bitten by a zombie & thus is infected. Poor old Colin is doomed to die & then come back as a mindless flesh eating zombie. Colin has to adjust to being a zombie & deal with all those nasty humans who try to kill him, this is his story...

This English production was shot, edited, written, produced & directed by Marc Price & I am finding all the positive comments absolutely baffling as Colin is surely one of the inept & tedious films ever made. For a start lets a get a couple of things straight, Colin is not the first film to be told from a zombie's point of view neither it is the first film to try & create sympathy for it's flesh eating undead despite what some may say. Where to start? To be fair the concept of a zombie film told from a zombie's perspective is cool but with such a low budget & very little talent on show the concept was doomed to die as we get endless scenes of Colin stumbling about doing nothing in particular. Occasionally Colin meets some humans who are being attacked by other zombies or are themselves attacking zombies, we never meet anyone or learn anything about anyone or the situation they find themselves in. Colin doesn't seem to take sides, neither the zombies or the people are seen as heroes or villains either way. Nobody says a sentence for like half an hour into the film, Colin doesn't speak until the very end in which he has a flashback revealing what happened at the start which should have been at the start rather than the end as it might have made us relate to Colin a bit more or emphasise with his transformation from ordinary bloke to mindless zombie. With zero character development or any sort of plot other than Colin wandering around the odd London street it's hard to see why Colin is getting so much praise. It's not a study of society in a crisis situation as we never see the wider society, only a few random people & the subplot about Colin's sister taking him home goes nowhere & like everything else here feels like padding. At over an hour & a half long Colin surely is one of the most uneventful & dullest films ever released, no character's & no plot basically add up to one long bore where the initial intriguing premise becomes old after about two minutes.

Right, rumour has it that Colin cost £45 to make (about $72) & all I have to say is where did all the money go? Obviously shot in people's houses & without permission on a council estate somewhere (central London is never seen) on a crappy hand-held camcorder (I think my Samsung Wave mobile phone HD camera can record clearer & sharper video than seen in Colin) Colin looks awful in every aspect. From the terrible lighting to the annoying shaky camcorder crap, whenever anything happens on screen it seems like it was shot by someone have a seizure or epileptic fit since the jerkiness is truly hideous & serves no artistic or practical function. There are scenes that are so badly lit, so dark & so shaky that it's literally impossible to tell what's happening, that cannot be right & Colin is just one long eyesore. The make-up effects are poor, there's some fake blood splashed around & some bits of meat probably brought from a local butcher for the zombies to chew on but there's no proper special effects here.

Probably edited on a PC or in camera Colin really is nothing more than a home movie, & a bad one too. Colin is a mindless zombie so the guy playing didn't have too much to do, the odd person that pops up are pretty terrible.

Colin is a film that I hated, I thought it was an ugly eyesore of a film that bored me to senseless & wasted a potentially decent idea. Maybe with an actual budget & actual filmmakers at the helm the concept may one day be turned into something good. Despite all the glowing praise I struggle to find one aspect of Colin that I liked.
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