User Reviews

Autumn starts as dead leaf fall from a tree, as it gently & slowly spirals to the ground billions of people worldwide suddenly & unexpectedly just collapse & die, as the leaf lands only a handful of human beings are left alive on Earth. In an American city Michael (Dexter Fletcher) saw his class of school-kids die before his very eyes but is one of the few survivors, after hearing some music on the radio he heads for the radio station where several other people are gathered drawn there by the music. Not knowing what happened everyone is scared & in a state of panic & at first decide to stick together but as the millions of dead bodies begin to rise & come back to life the fear of disease convinces several of them to head for the most isolated place they can find, Michael, Carl (Dickon Tolson) & Emma (Lana Kamenov) decide to live in a farmhouse in the country but more & more zombie gravitate there as they seem to regain their intelligence & soon the survivors realise they are after them...

This Canadian production was co-edited, co-written, co-produced & directed by Steve Rumbelow & don't be fooled by the glowing comments that tell you not to be fooled by the negative comments (that sort of makes sense) as Autumn really does deserve all the bad press & bad reviews that it is getting & will undoubtedly continue to get as more & more people are unlucky enough to endure it's near two hour duration. Based on the novel by David Moody who co-wrote the screenplay Autumn feels like so many much better apocalyptic end of the world type zombie films but without any of the horror or threat or budget. Autumn most closely resembles 28 Days Later... (2002), it's sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007) & the Will Smith flick I Am Legend (2007) in the sense that the world population has been all but wiped out by some sort of virus or disease & a handful of survivors must fight hordes of zombies as well as figure out how to find food & secure shelter although there are bits of Night of the Living Dead (1968) as well with it's isolated farmhouse setting. Overall Autumn is a poor effort from supposedly good source material with poor character's who make stupid decisions & are just plain idiotic at times (have none of them ever seen a zombie film before?) & a plot which is never really explained & some poor scripting like the fence that keeps all the zombies out is only a flimsy wooden one that is only waist high so you could probably fall over it, they don't seem to stock up on much food, they don't seem bothered in getting any protection like guns & there are inconsistencies like these zombies are supposedly flesh eaters yet at the end one moment Michael can walk past them to turn the generator on yet seconds later they attack & kill Carl. At almost two hours in length it's really boring, virtually nothing happens with a small number of people living in a farmhouse for the majority of the running time doing nothing in particular & a very sudden & abrupt climax which is always very frustrating unless it's some cool twist which this ain't. While the basic plot is alright it's nothing we haven't seen before & because the zombies don't become any sort of threat until the last third there's no tension & the film just plods along until a pointless David Carradine cameo & a crap ending.

There are posts on the Autumn message board asking if this was filmed on a mobile phone & while I wouldn't be that cruel I can see where people are coming from as it looks really cheap & like it was shot on a camcorder with jerky hand-held shakiness & bad colour & lighting. Personally I hate the look of video when it's this cheap & wish filmmakers would go back to using good old film. There's virtually no gore whatsoever since the zombie don't become killers until the second half of the film & even then they kill a poodle & that's about it apart from some scenes of people coughing up blood at the start & some poorly made-up zombies. Autumn tries to create a sense of apocalypse at the start & it show's one whole street wrecked which they keep showing throughout the film when the makers need to show some carnage & you can tell it's the same street because that bloody school bus parked across the train tracks is always there. There are no scares, no tension, no atmosphere & there's no sense of global disaster since we see so little of anything.

Shot in Ontario in Canada the film looks bland & is badly made throughout as the zombie extras try desperately not to break the flimsy fence down merely by leaning on it! The acting is OK, I can't believe Dexter Fletcher got involved with this although maybe he just wanted to see Canada & get paid for it but whats even more baffling is how the filmmakers persuaded the late David Carradine to appear in a bad cameo.

Autumn is a apocalyptic end of the world seen it all before zombie flick that makes the fatal mistake of not having any killer zombies in it right up until the end, at almost two hours most people will have a hard time staying awake through this one be it zombie, horror or post apocalyptic fans.

I must say I am deeply concerned about the credibility of many of the reviewers of this film. (Please don't review movies if you haven't watched them, or watched a pirated version, or have only seen the trailer). To call this movie one of the worst movies ever made is a grave injustice. In fact, if I wanted to waste my time with your insufferable reviews, I would go through and give all of you an unhelpful marks, for your comments about this film. Many of you clearly didn't even watch the film, based on the things you said, and I can only guess that many of the reviewers used pirated versions rather than the version that I saw. Another problem is that many of you are commenting about this film who dislike the genre in the first place.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That is usually what happens with zombie movies nowadays. This film was creative and original. It tried some new things, and didn't just follow the typical formula.

Sure it didn't have a huge budget, the lighting was off at times, but it was overall a very original well done film. In fact, some of the cinematography was downright haunting and beautiful. This movie is right up there with Colin as one of the best lower budget and most original zombie movies.

I should also let all the haters know that I watch every zombie and infected movie. I consider myself as close to an expert as they come. This is my favorite Genre. From Night of the living dead to Colin, Ponty Pool, Day of the dead (1985), 28 days later, Rec2, Cemetery man, White zombie, Dead Snow, Tokyo Zombie, Fido, Zombie, Deadgirl, Return of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and on and on, I have seen virtually all of them and for any serious zombie fan, this deserves to be given your attention.

I must apologize to the actors and filmmakers, that there are so many actual zombies out there in the real world reviewing this film. I will give this film a 9 out of 10.

If this movie had come out in the day of Evil Dead, I'm willing to bet a lot of horror fans would have forgiven its obviously substandard technical aspects. The almost uniform loathing of this little indie is no doubt a sign of how low a tolerance audiences have for truly independent films. Independent does not mean pre-sold to lionsgate, who agreed to fund a huge share of the budget therefore allowing the filmmakers to hire experienced DPs to shoot on brandy new Oakley Red packages. No, no. Often, this is what independent looks like, requiring us viewers to look beyond the technical and into the heart of the story.

On that note, Autumn has an interesting approach to the Zombie genre in that the zombies start out very benign and not much of a threat at all, becoming more and more of a danger as the movie marches on.

The "Live together or die alone" theme isn't so awfully new to this genre, but Autumn carries it well. Aside from the threesome we spend most of our screen-time with, the other characters quickly become foot-notes. It's almost jarring when they show up again just to illustrate that they ultimately died horribly. It made me wish the screenwriter had employed the good sense to trimming those characters and devote more time to fleshing out the core.

For me, that was where the true failings of Autumn came into focus. There was almost enough character development to elevate the movie above typical entries into the zombie genre, but not quite. It's clear that there is a great story with some really interesting character work laying beneath the veneer, but ultimately the A.D.D. inspired beat choices win out.

Still, I would watch Autumn if zombie flicks are your thing. There are enough twangs of originality to make it worthwhile.

I was going to write a full plot with critiques etc within this review but who wants to read that? So instead I will just summarise why I have only awarded this film a lowly 4 out of 10.

Now I LOVE zombie movies, my favourite genre. The desperation, the isolation, the inevitable. However, this film, whilst showing some degree of promise sadly tries just a bit too hard and reaches a little too far to attempt to make it an introspective look at blah, blah, blah and ends up just missing the mark completely. Worse still, it misses the mark in numerous areas.

IT IS PUT SIMPLY, A ZOMBIE FILM - but for most of the film the 'zombies' aren't violent, aren't 'out to get you/your flesh' etc, they are just walking around aimlessly.... er, OK. Eventually they become attracted by sound and then start to become aggressive at the source of that sound, but they fail to ever be scary.... which a hundred corpses stood outside your house should be! And the make-up is very VERY amateur.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT - Nothing. None of the characters actually talks about themselves with each other - we have a few scenes before the virus hits of Dexter Fletcher as a teacher etc... but after the event we learn nothing about any of the survivors - no real development of anyone. One case in point (out of MANY I could have chosen!) is that there a two English guys there and not even the simplest of questions along the lines of where are you from, what are you doing over here etc... nothing.

ACTING - Badly delivered. No chemistry. People just reeling off line after line. Almost painful.

Camera WORK / DIRECTION / EDITING - Is absolutely and utterly abysmal. Attempts to be far to arty with poorly written and delivered monologues over stills etc. Camera shaking a la NYPD Blue for no reason. Attempts at Sin City-esquire 'neo-noir' again for no reason. Its just a complete mess of unrelated styles, none of which work. I don't want to watch footage of people learning what each button does which was hastily cobbled together with fades / freeze-frames and even a wipe transition!

OK, I think that pretty much sums it up in my eyes. I still like Dexter Fletcher - always have, ever since 'Press Gang'!, but the film was poorly scripted, poorly directed, too arty with a cast of low rate actors (and no, for future reference, David Carradine CANNOT save a film by having little more than a cameo!)

So I give it a 4 - and feel I am being generous. I am sure it would be a good book, but as it stands, with direction this bad.. its definitely not a good film.

To start off, I really like end-of-the world type movies. You think to yourself what you would do in that situation and you can play them out in your head as the movie progresses.

Here, we have something "killing" people. No one knows what it is. No one who survives really cares why they are still living. No one is asking each other what common denominators they have that might make them immune to whatever is killing everyone else. That's when you need a scientist cast into one of the roles. However, the reason why everyone is dead is totally ignored throughout the film.

OK, so you are one of the survivors. What to do? Well, according to some of them (and by the way, we don't know how many there are...but a dozen or so seem to show up pretty quickly in the first few minutes and none after that...go figure) they need to get out of the city and go someplace safe. According to the logic, they should pick a fairly secure area where the awakening dead, general bad guys, and disease can't get to them easily. What do they do? They pick a farm out in the middle of no where that is easily breached..even by mindless corpses. I don't really care for Zombie type movies, but these zombies are worthless. They are like wind up toys who run into buildings...ooohhh, real scary.

The main characters themselves are just stupid people. You constantly want to tell them they are doing it all wrong. I think an obvious solution to the zombies would be to setup a noise making device far away from where you live so they are attracted to it...but no, that would be too easy. Why not make noises where you live and attract them. I'm sure they smell great and that's one reason to keep them around.

One thing that was great was to see the same road shot over and over again with the same cars on it. It's even in the trailer. Since the audience is assumed to be so dumb, why not just re-shoot the same road; no one will notice.

I was half expecting there to be at least some competition for the lone female...that didn't happen. I guess she was not attractive enough to fight for.

We are told the zombies have no pulse and I'm thinking how they are suppose to have locomotion. I would think that after about 2 months, their corpses would have fallen off the bone or at least the animals/bugs would have taken care of them.

I could go on and on, but if you want to be annoyed beyond comprehension, feel free to watch this movie. Oh, and whatever you do...if this happens in real life, make sure you ride around in a piece of junk van instead of a fully loaded luxury SUV. I would...because we all know we would want to make our lives as miserable as possible since we could do anything we want.

Οh my God, i just finished seeing this movie, run directly to the PC to finally register at IMDb just to warn people from this neverending absolutely boring zombie flick.... It didn't bother me that it was totally cheap-homemade quality, because many good zombie movies i have seen had cheap production values, but because it made absolutely no sense. They give no answers at all, the beginning was totally rushed just to get to the 80 minutes middle section in witch we see the same old stuff we saw 100's of times. The ending is as bad and even worse as the beginning of the movie. I want spend any more time to this, just if you want an honest opinion of an ordinary viewer, don't waste your time on this.

Autumn fails on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin, so let's start with the successes: The zombies are fairly believable. The decay and blood splattering isn't overdone, I suppose the zombies haven't had long to decay. The first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie made me feel slightly nervous. I won't speculate as to why but it may not have been because the scene was set well...

The film as released has so many failings. It is like a very poor workprint. The editing is badly timed, not at all sharp. Sometimes scenes hang like something is about to happen and nothing does. This doesn't build tension, it just makes you raise an eyebrow.

Dream sequences are so badly signposted that you are not sure if you missed something or if the sequence is a dream or a bit of unassociated cutaway. The quality of the cinematography and lighting is very patchy. It's almost like they are trying to add comic book effect to some scenes, although no other elements enhance or correlate with this and so it just looks badly done.

The plot is so overdone now that it is a genre all of its own. 'Plague hits world, people turn to zombies, a few don't, zombies chase and try to eat them.' The only variation in the genre really is if the people being chased survive or die. I've already forgotten what happened at the end and even at the time it wasn't too clear what the motivations were and what occurred. Really you need to tell a story within a genre, not just sketch the genre out badly.

The movie is unpacey, unoriginal and uninteresting. There's nothing original. The movies really doesn't even make a point in the absence of a story. If someone told me that the writer had read 'I am Legend' and watched a few zombie flicks then made this film in the following two days I wouldn't be surprised. It is derivative in a very mundane way.

There's not really even a main character to flesh out, just 3 or 4 characters that come in and out of scenes and shots looking numb. There is no passion about the film, no emotion that you can empathise with and very little solid acting.

Why Carradine and Fletcher starred in it I do not know. But I can't believe either of them needed the money that much... Fletcher is the best of the bunch and if he'd have had some good lines to say or some good action to take part in he would no doubt have put in a decent showing. As it is I suspect the direction was lacking and he comes out as transparent rather than actively bad (unlike the terrible 'mockney' second male lead). Carradine isn't very good. It's hard to know whether the director or actor are to blame.

The sound is worse than many student movies I have seen where all the audio was from the on camera mic. Some sentences are barely heard or fade in and out. This sort of thing is only vaguely acceptable when the recording is supposed to be gonzo or at least hand held and effects mask some words. Even then it would be annoying, but understandable.

The whole film is like someone was told zombie flicks could be made well on a budget and didn't realise that they still had to have a selling point and some production values.

I wanted to like this movie but I couldn't.

AUTUMN isn't a badly crafted movie (although several scenes ARE badly underlit), nor badly acted (the performances are probably what make it worth watching), but the WRITING and the DIRECTION- especially during the first few scenes- leave more than a little to be desired. Sure, confusion WOULD ensue once a zombiepocalypse got under way, but confusing the viewer doesn't help the filmmaker's cause. There are some very striking shots throughout (the burning automobiles that form an obstacle course for survivors to wend their way through, the shoulder-to-shoulder zombies pressing against the windshield as supplies are scavenged, etc.) and the makeup fx are good, but the pacifist-zombie approach goes just a little too much against the grain. (Yes, the undead finally wake up to the fact that meat is readily available, but by then the movie's winding down.) It's not badly thought out for the most part, but nonetheless reminds me of the black and white zombie comic THE WALKING DEAD: early on in that series, a pair of characters hurry off to a gun shop in search of weapons. They reason that no one would have bothered to rob a gun shop with an army of walking dead on the streets. By what logic...? (Having survived race riots, I can personally attest to one thing: pawn shops and any other business that sold guns were hit VERY hard...) The building of a waist-high fence to keep the zombies out in AUTUMN was a likewise WTF moment. Still, David Carradine's cameo is memorable.

This movie sells itself as a zombie movie. It's listed under the genres Horror/Thriller and its tagline is "Silence is your savior".

The whole problem is that they are NEVER in danger. The zombies are not real zombies as we would expect them to be. There are several scenes with the main characters just walking past crowds of Walking Corpses that do them no harm.

During the whole movie, a movie that sells itself as a Horror/thriller zombie movie, there is only ONE kill. A dog. Other than that, only one of the main characters and only ONCE gets *attacked* and gets nothing but scracthes. And very superficial ones. Not one drop of blood. I've gotten more injured playing with my cat than the main character got being attacked by dozens of ZOMBIES.

So, where exactly is the Thrill? Where exactly is the Horror? Why silence is your savior? Savior from what, if the corpses are not attacking? They are only drawn by sound, but once they are at your door, all they do is annoy you. They didn't manage to break a single glass, or a door, or anything. They are the weakest, most harmless zombies ever! All they do is bark and walk around! I'm sorry, but those main characters wouldn't have survived 10 minutes if those Walking Corpses were any real threat to them.

Now, if this movie had tried instead to sell itself as a drama, or a vision of what life would be if you and handful of other people were the only survivors in a world with walking rotten corpses that posed no danger to you at all, THEN it would have been an AVERAGE movie. Because even that wasn't explored to its potential.

So, this is most horrible attempt to make a zombie movie ever. Unless you don't call it a zombie movie and remove it from the horror/thriller genres since there is none of that in it(except for the poor dog, that is).

Autumn is an awful, pointless, complete and utter disaster of a movie. The pacing is slow, the plot virtually non-existent, the editing is atrocious, the acting is mediocre at best (I think the 'zombies' stole the show, and they were terrible), the 'special effects' are laughable, and the ending is sudden and completely unrewarding.

I decided to give this movie 2/10, because I believe that even though it deserves less, a 1/10 should perhaps be saved for movies so bad that they are actually funny. But not this one. This was just painful to watch. I think I've summed up my feelings about this movie, but just to elaborate why I think it was so bad - it was adapted from a book (which I've not read), so it's gone through 2 entirely separate stages where someone with an ounce of common sense and judgement should have said "No, this is awful. You aren't getting this published/filmed." And yet somehow it made it through both.

And finally..David Carradine. His inclusion in the movie was brief and extremely pointless as well. His scenes should have been edited out so as to not (further) tarnish his career posthumously.

As a 'zombie' film, a thriller and a horror movie this fails on every level. It truly looks like a half-baked student film, and not the work of a supposed seasoned professional (take a look at Mr Rumbelow's biography to see what I mean.) Avoid this at all costs, unless you feel like wasting an hour or 2 of your life.