HUMAN SENSING
There's something sort of inhuman about 2022's Unhuman. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the characters here who come off as so unlikable to the audience it's hard to root for them. They're poor man's Breakfast Club types aspiring to be Shaun of the Dead types. High school, well it sure has been bleak for them.
So yeah, Unhuman is a zombie movie with all these HS stereotypes (how'd you guess). You got the jock, the princess, the oppressed smart girl, the token, and the nerds. Their bus crashes during a field trip, they escape, and then they must band together to try and stop some revived corpses.
Director Marcus Dunstan pulls off all the stops with Unhuman. Less gory than most, he infuses split screens, wipes, slow-mo stuff, and Dutch angles to let the world know he's showing off. Hey, I give him a little credit because there's enough zombie fabric out there to power a small country. Gotta inject some new life (ha ha) into an already manifest genre.
Unhuman breaks itself down into three parts. It's an ambitious if overwrought viewing experience. The first part is the set up (mentioned in the second paragraph). The second part is the refreshing twist (told in one long flashback). The third part is the high school misfits getting their revenge on by fighting ugly (with fists of fury).
In retrospect, helmer Dunstan tries really hard to make you forget that Unhuman is just another pic about the Walking dead. His film is more a tongue in cheek conspiracy, a John Hughes hue, or a high school reprisal prank if you will. I give him points for that but the problem is his actors who are faceless, falsely witty, and only moderately plucky. They're in a movie that's not "unwatchable" but more of a slight, "human" stain.
Written by Jesse Burleson
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