Review: Steve Niles' Remains

Premieres on Chiller, Friday, Dec. 16, at 10 p.m.

Mike Demenchuk -- Multichannel News, 12/12/2011 12:01:00 AM

Zombies — enlivened by the runaway success of AMC’s The Walking Dead — have become a hot genre property. So it was probably a no-brainer for Chiller to mine the same territory with its first original movie, Steve Niles’ Remains.

The telepic — like Walking Dead, adapted from a graphic novel — is the story of what happens to a handful of survivors of “Peace Day,” when the U.S. nuclear arsenal is put out of use with a massive detonation in a desert near Reno, Nevada.

In Reno itself, we meet Tom (Grant Bowler, True Blood) a downon- his-luck blackjack dealer now plies his trade at the run-down Silver Star Saloon. He has a flirtation-hate relationship with one of the casino’s cocktail waitresses, Tori (Evalena Marie, Are We There Yet?), and convinces her to join him for a few moments of passion in the casino’s vault.

When they emerge, they find that the blast has transformed most of Reno’s citizens have into flesh-eating zombies. They eventually find a third survivor in Jensen (Miko Hughes), a magician’s assistant who was in the storage room during the blast, and a fourth in Victor (Anthony Marks), who is saved from a marauding horde of zombies outside.

The rest of the film follows the quartet’s fight to survive the zombie apocalypse and reach out to the world beyond in search of others who aren’t affected. The zombies themselves look very much the part, and a lot went into making the post-apocalyptic landscape seem real. As much care should have been put into the script. The movie doesn’t do much to explain the relationships between the various characters, and often times they don’t relate at all.

Eventually, the quartet receives a radio signal from some unaffected humans, a psuedomilitary brigade led by Ramsey (Lance Reddick) and his daughter Cindy (Tawny Cypress). Soon enough, there’s a battle between the survivors, the soldiers take all the provisions from the casino, and Tom and Tori are on their own again. The soldiers are later attacked, and Cindy returns, leading to even more tension.

As a first effort at an original film, Remains is a mixed bag. Strong production values aren’t enough to overcome a script that could have used a few more revisions.

— Michael Demenchuk