For those who can't read French, it says "A cross between 28 DAYS LATER and THE FLY".
Director: David Morlet
Cast: Hélène de Fougerolles, Francis Renaud, Dida Diafat
Country: France
“Mutants” is the latest edition to the increasingly popular new wave of French horror but instead of the knife-weilding psychos from “Haute Tension”, “L’interieur” or “Frontier(s)”, this film would normally fall under the zombie category if it’s “infected” weren’t being turned into hyper-evolved, man-eating mutants.
It is about a paramedic and her husband on the wintery countryside of France looking for survivors of a pandemic that turned half the world’s inhabitants into cannibalistic creatures.. After a run-in with someone infected, whom they thought was just mentally ill (number 1 in a series of stupid decisions), the husband starts to show signs of infection when they hide out at a seemingly abandoned hospital (stupid decision number 2). The wife, who shares with the audience way late into the film that she is immune to the outbreak, refuses to kill him or let him end his life and decides to wait it out at the hospital while she tries to find a cure on her own (number 3) as he slowly morphs into a twisted beast. The poster’s comparison to “28 Days Later” and “The Fly” is pretty spot on.
Now, I only compare “Mutants” with it’s gory French peers because it was also marketed as such. To be honest, it was very tame in terms of gore and shock value in comparison. There are a number of fairly disturbing scenes when the man is starting to get rather sickly; his molars start to fall out on their own accord and his urine turns blood red, but these scenes are few and far between. The movie is hindered further by being infested with obvious zombie cliches and unimportant and moronic characters (see stupid decisions 1 through 3) who only complicate an otherwise simple story. I think it’s a bad sign when the audience of your North American premiere is laughing and rooting for your protagonists to fail.
Fortunately, “Mutants” still stays fresh in a film scene where “zombie” is hardly the buzz word it once was. As with all of our zombie faves, it comes with an underlying message that becomes more important than the movie itself. My girlfriend (whom I went to FanTasia with) has a father constantly in and out of the hospital with lung and brain cancer, and we both found many interesting parallels between her situation and the plight of the film’s protagonists. The paramedic keeps pressing her near-dead husband into staying alive despite the fact that the pain of his transformation is unbearable. She inadvertently gets him addicted to medicine and pain killers, and helps him comb out his hair that is falling out in the handfuls. This theme stirs questions about our treatment of terminally ill loved ones and the selfishness and hypocrisy behind our resentment towards euthanasia. At what point does medical treatment become crueler than death itself?
With that said, “Mutants” should’ve been called “28 Months Later”; the mood, the camera work, the atmosphere, the music. The whole “on the run from monsters while seeking out a rumoured military fortress” aspect is there too. Still, the plot is intriguing enough to sit all the way through, and some of the kills are really well filmed. Besides a close-to-home sub-plot, however, “Mutants” brings nothing new to the game of running zombies. Not great, but far from being the worst movie I saw during my time at the festival.
