REDCON-1
28 Quid Later
released 28 september 18 | 118 minutes
Director Chee Keong Cheung Cast Oris erhuero, Carlos Gallardo, mark strange, Katarina leigh Waters
The publicity for Redcon-1 describes it as “28 Days Later meets The Raid”, which is true in the sense that it’s a British zombie film that features quite a bit of kicking and punching. In reality, however, it’s as cheaply made (one scene features two sets of weather – one dry, the other drizzling) as it is puerile and hollow.
Set in an England that’s under siege, the story follows a squad of eight special forces soldiers who are on a mission to rescue a scientist from a quarantine zone that has been overrun by zombies. The twist here is that the undead retain fragments of memories, which sounds like potentially interesting territory for drama, but instead is impetus for them to do hilarious things such as mindlessly watch pornography or engage in OTT videogame-style martial arts; both of which invite you to laugh, but are too braindead to inspire anything other than despair.
Redcon-1 flirts with the more bombastic elements of B-movie schlock, but is neither funny enough to be endearing, nor executed well enough to be taken seriously. One particular shot sees a dead baby hanging out of its mother on the street – a level of pure nastiness that could be stomached in a better film, but feels jarring in one that is so profoundly stupid.
The prison in the film is the former HMP Peterhead, which closed in 2013, and is now the Peterhead Prison Museum.