#4 of 100 on my 100 Movies I’ve Never Seen Before Challenge (part II)

Zombie movies have been done to death– no pun intended. The problem with zombie flicks nowadays is that once one of them manages to have an original take on the genre, twenty more come along and try to capitalize on what made that one original so great. Sometimes they may get lucky and duplicate the success but others it results in a mindless, loud movie that has nothing at all to offer. “Devil’s Playground”, fits into the category of crappy and useless rip offs.

Starring Craig Fairbrass and Danny Dyer, “Devil’s Playground” is set in the UK and centers around a pharmaceutical company called N-Gen, which has developed a new performance enhancing drugs which they promise has no side effects, but of course it does. Hundreds of people volunteer for drug trials but soon enough, people are infected and start running around biting people. To make things even more ridiculous, all of the zombies seem to suddenly know parkour. I’m sure this was done to stress the “performance enhancing” element of the drug but it looks so stupid when the zombies start bouncing and spinning of walls or propelling themselves by swinging on pipes.

So, the infection spreads and “Devil’s Playground” plays like every zombie movie you have seen with people running and screaming and trying to hide until they can hide no more. There really isn’t much else to it. Most of the “survivor” characters get much of an introduction. The ones that do are pretty stereotypical and poorly written. One guy gets bitten early but luckily he has some epinephrine shots that for whatever reason seem to keep the virus from taking over his body. There is a quick flash back to explain why he has them but it still doesn’t make sense. Of course, one character that was a trial subject for the drug appears to be immune to the virus but there isn’t much of an explanation as to why.

The movie is a complete waste of time.