Now available in wide retail stores across USA/Canada and streaming platforms via Wild Eye Releasing, 5G ZOMBIES was a curious project I worked on in April of last year. With the pandemic putting a stop or certainly delay to many filmmakers projects, it was reasoned that if we couldn’t make a full film, could we pool our efforts into one full-length feature? Headed by John R. Walker in the UK and old collaborator Dustin Ferguson, a worldwide team of us threw in independent subplots.
My segments were about a grizzled conspiracy theorist emerging from his home to trek his way through woodlands toward a mobile phone tower where he believes the plague can be stopped if only he can shut down the signal. A nearby zombie shadows him until a bleakly ironic twist becomes the literal death of him. In a second revelation, we realize he has been aware all along that the zombie is his dead best friend who he has been narrating his progress to.
Dealing with the limitations of gathering a cast and crew together at the time, I took an extreme guerrilla approach and wrote, directed and even starred in my storyline. Shooting on a beautiful mountaintop made the job an all-round fun experience. Trudging around in the Autumn sun, I switched between scenery, POV shots and turning the camera on myself as I dutifully ticked off the shotlist. Oh yeah – not only did I play the main acting role of the human, I played the secondary role of the attacking zombie as well. As my now well-worn punchline to friends and colleagues goes, you might say I ate myself.
The resulting flick is what you’d imagine it to be – an experimental patchwork. But the editing holds it all together, ensuring a simultaneous worldwide view of a nightmare pandemic in perpetual motion. Like REUNION MASSACRE, this one has toured a few distributors before its current wide release. SCS Entertainment released it to DVD last year, then later on solicited by own label through New Wave to put together a blu-ray special edition. The movie made a nice little splash, too – due to the provocative title, the resulting affair reached as far as Political news site The Drudge Report in the USA.