The Rezort (2015)

In desperate need of an original plot.

Here's the pitch:  A remote island accessible only by sea converted into a unique holiday park for the rich.  Dangerous beasts roam the island, contained by a network of gates and electrified fences while the visitors tour the island in special trucks.  A sudden computer failure wipes out the security measures, setting the beasts loose, and a small group of tourists struggle to survive as they attempt to flee the island.

Does that sound familiar to you?  It certainly should, Jurassic Park (1993) has grossed over a billion dollars since its release and remains an iconic movie.  So why am I writing about that movie when this review is supposed to be about The Rezort?  I'm writing about Jurassic Park because The Rezort is that movie with dinosaurs swapped out for zombies, and it's not just the basic premise.  At times it seems like a team has sat down with a copy of JP and faithfully transcribed the scenes, then The Rezort was made with a tenth of the budget.  The approach to the island is now by boat, not helicopter, Archer (an uncomfortable-looking Dougray Scott) acts as the love child of Sam Neill, Bob Peck and Jeff Goldblum from JP, Melanie (Jessica De Gouw) tries to be Laura Dern, falling some way short, we have a budget computer operating centre, and Land Rovers replacing the automated cars, but it's all pretty much there.

OK, there's nothing wrong with taking a good idea and twisting it. Heck, books and movies have been doing that forever and we all know the concept that there are only so many stories to tell, but there's direct transfer here that makes no sense when you're hunting zombies rather than dinosaurs.  In Jurassic Park the dinosaurs are contained by electric fences - that makes sense, they're animals and we know that electric fences are competent at containing living animals.  The Rezort also uses electric fences (of course - JP does) but does that make sense when you're trying to contain zombies?  Do zombies feel pain?  Can they be killed or even affected by an electric fence?  The movie itself has a scene reminding us they can only be killed by a headshot so if you're herding zombies, don't you just want really strong fences?  The electric fence setup in JP works because we can accept the power failure allows the dinos to break down those fences, but in The Rezort I'm never convinced they would have provided suitable containment in the first place.  There is a slight nod to this, we see some gates popping open when the systems go haywire, but if it's the opening of the gates that's important, that's yet more evidence that the electrification of the fences is not.  If the gates are the vital container, then why the heck would you engineer them to fail to an open state?  Engineers have been doing this for hundreds of years, if you've got a system that changes state on power supply, you engineer it to fail to a safe condition, that means the gates failing to a locked state (with some sort of manual override only operable by living humans), not an open one.

The rubber-stamping of Jurassic Park is not The Rezort's only problem.  This is, apparently, a venue for the very rich, but must still have huge operating costs.  The park in JP is clearly set up to receive thousands of visitors, but the accommodation on The Rezort's island looks more like a 3-star hotel in Spain (and, since I've just seen the filming locations include Palma de Mallorca, probably was), and when we see the tourists leave on their first "safari", it's a half-dozen Land Rovers - and that's the total capacity of the garage we see - so that's what, 30 people, tops?  How does that park survive?  Does each guest pay $100,000 a night?  We're given the idea it's expensive, but it's still within the reach of the common folk, given what we see of the guests.  Even that 3-star in Spain would struggle with a guest count that low.

The "weapons training" is at the same time laughable and terrifying.  Laughable because it appears to consist of a staff member handing out automatic weapons and just allowing the guests to work it out for themselves for 10 minutes, and terrifying because the scene looks dangerous even from a filming point of view, with cast waving these weapons around with abandon.  A quick check of IMDB shows that there was an armourer on the crew, but perhaps he was off that day.

Then there's the safari itself.  We see the guests taken to various spots where the undead are manacled to remotely operated targets - like a living dead version of a law-enforcement training range - but then we're shown our main characters taken to a tent village for the night.  Seriously?  The island is covered with thousands of flesh-eating infectious zombies and you want me to sleep in a tent in the middle of a valley?  NO WAY!  I don't care what fences you have (and no one even asks about this, by the way), there is no anyone with 3 brain cells to rub together is going to agree to that.

We do, of course, have the obligatory "vehicle won't start in an emergency".  OK, it's a Land Rover Defender and they have a... less than spotless reliability record (I should know, I owned one myself for 5 years), but this movie trope is so old and tired it makes me scream every time it crops up.  These are not even your average household car, they're vehicles used professionally, dispatched from a maintenance hanger, there's no way they should have problems starting.  Arghhhhhhhh!

So, our heroes have to cross the island to get to the port - well, the small jetty - to escape the island before it's bombed into oblivion.  From this point on it's pretty standard zombie-movie fare.  Jump scares, running, more jump-scares, dark inexplicable passages, heroic sacrifices, shock bites on heroes, you get the idea.  To be fair, the action here isn't bad (which is what lifts my score to 3 stars), it's just completely and utterly unoriginal.

There is one clue that not all went smoothly on filming, and/or that there were late changes.  In the intensely annoying opening newscast/exposition sequence that lasts waaaay too long, we're shown a studio with a background image of "Simon Givvens, Rezort CEO"

then a few seconds later are told that the CEO is "Valerie Wilton" (played by a very much wasted Claire Goose).  I don't recognise the actor in the Simon Givvens shot, but clearly something didn't work out there...

The Rezort isn't a terrible movie.  It's well-shot, the actors do the best they can with the plot and the script, and the action sequences are entertaining, but it's really hard to give any credit to such a direct take on Jurassic Park and equally difficult to accept "just another zombie movie" with really nothing to distinguish itself from the others that had gone before.