Wrymwood Road Of The Living Dead Film Analysis

The film by Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner titled “Wrymwood: Road of the Dead” is a low budget zombie genre horror movie that was filmed in Australia and was released in 2014. Wrymwood is an extension of the zombie genre that draws on typical zombie cannon while exploring concepts that are atypical of most modern zombie movies. The film expertly combines a post-apocalyptic zombie story with the ideas of another Australian classic in the “Mad Max” series (Dee, 2015). While the movie clearly does not possess the high budget effects of many of today’s zombie films, it is an entertaining escape from many of the formulaic films of today that draw from the well of Romero’s original work in “Night of the Living Dead”

The tile of the film, Wyrmwood, draws parallels with an excerpt from the book of Revelation in the Bible. This passage states “and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from heaven. It fell on a third of the rivers and springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood” Rev 6:15 (Holman Christian Standard Bible). The film begins with a chaotic scene where a group of heavily armed and armored survivors battle against a pack of gas spewing zombies in order to retrieve a truck outside of a garage. This scene of chaos cuts to character Benny telling a story of the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. In his story he explains that during a trip

to the outback, he and his brother saw a meteor shower light up the sky. This story, similar to the one in the Bible preludes an outbreak where all people who do not have A negative blood become infected with some sort of zombie causing pathogen. The downfall of society sets in rapidly as the unsuspecting public is set upon by zombies (Roache-Turner & Roache-Turner, 2014).
The main protagonist, Barry, finds himself on a mission to find and rescue his sister, Brooke, who has been captured by a military unit led by an insane doctor who is conducting experiments on the undead in the back of a highly modified utility truck. As the movie progresses, Barry and Benny meet up with other survivors who are trapped inside a garage. The protagonists, realizing they need to secure a truck outside of the garage, find odds and ends of sporting gear to armor themselves against bites of the zombies. This armor proves to be ineffective in preventing one of the group from being mauled by a zombie resulting in his being turned himself. After they have secured the truck, the protagonists modify the vehicle to make it more zombie resistant (Roache-Turner & Roache-Turner, 2014).
The sporting gear armor, and the highly modified and caged vehicle pay homage to an earlier Australian film in the Mad Max series.

In that film the villains armor their vehicles and themselves in much the same way that Wyrmwood’s protagonist do (Kennedy & Miller, 1981). Had the protagonists had the foresight to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, they might have read Max Brooks work on preparing for and surviving a zombie outbreak. If they had, they might have avoided the pitfall of wearing armor. That being a dangerous overconfidence in the ability of the armor to protect an individual from a zombie bite (Brooks,

2003).
Where the movie takes an interesting turn from many existing zombie movies is in having the undead produce a combustible gas while all normally combustible fuels no longer work. This is likely due to whatever organism is creating the zombies in the first place. The zombies expel this gas during the day, but appear to internalize it at night as a fuel that increases their speed. The protagonists are able to harness this trait in order to fuel their modified truck (Roache-Turner & Roache-Turner, 2014). This is a far different concept than those expressed in many zombie related films and books. In the classic “Night of the Living Dead”, the zombies are always slow and lumbering (Hardman, Streiner, & Romero, 1968). Similarly, Brooks’ description of a viral cause for zombie outbreaks does not permit zombies the ability to move rapidly at any point (Brooks, 2003).