Australian Film Wyrmwood Is “Mad Max” Meets “Dawn of the Dead”

Making its way from Fantastic Fest to the American Film Market this coming week is Australian zombie film Wyrmwood. Already hailed as “a fearlessly fun and bloody B-movie that mixes up sci-fi-style action with zombie mayhem” comes an enjoyable and a smart bit of midnight movie fun. We’re crossing our fingers that this title will be out in the U.S. soon.

Here’s the skinny from Altitude Film:

Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead in this raucous post-apocalyptic epic that’s one of the most original and wildly entertaining genre films in years.
In the aftermath of a comet breaking up over Earth, most of the planet’s population quickly succumb to a strange disease which turns them into ‘zombies’. Few survive, and those who do, quickly discover all existing fuel sources have been rendered useless by the plague.

Trapped in a wilderness teeming with living dead and unable to travel to any safer location, survivors have little to live for. One of those survivors, family man Barry has lost everything except his sister Brooke. She is kidnapped by a gang of paramilitary thugs and dragged off to a terrifying medical lab run by a psychotic ‘doctor’ who is performing a series of deranged experiments on plague survivors.

As Brooke struggles to devise an escape plan, she slowly realizes that the Doctor’s experiments have given her strange powers over his zombie captives. Meanwhile, Barry teams up with fellow survivors Benny, Frank and Kelly, determined to rescue Brooke and protect what family he has left. Wyrmwood adds a refreshing and irreverent spin on the zombie mythos. With a healthy dose of Mad Max-inspired vehicular mayhem and an enormous serving of pure, raw talent, the Roache-Turner Brothers have put themselves on the map with a brilliantly inventive crowd-pleaser.

And a review from Fantastic Fest says the film’s Antipodean origins hint at links to George Miller (Mad Max-style features strongly) and Peter Jackson (from his Bad Taste days). The film premiered at the Austin festival and has also been picked up for international by the UK’s Altitude Film Entertainment.

Check out the trailer and some extras from the film crew: