Freddy's 31 Days of Horror Day 2: Kiah Roach-Turner's Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
Ozploitation at it's finest ladies and gentlemen! Kiah Roach-Turner's first foray into film-making is an amazing low budget zombie movie hailing from the land down under and very much feels like early Peter Jackson blood and guts mayhem! We are introduced to our two main protagonists Berry and Benny who tell their sad tales of how they came to meet in the zombie apocalypse. Berry has nothing left but his sister Brooke who he goes down said road of the dead to rescue with his hilariously bushwhack and inappropriate new friend Benny. It's a pretty basic zombie plot but what makes any zombie movie truly worth watching is what it adds to the mythos.
Three ideas are introduced in this film that feel like an amalgam of zombie movies that Roach-Turner loves and some batsh*t crazy ideas he just threw out there and rolled with. First off for some reason all forms of combustible gas seem to no longer work in this world. You would assume it has something to do with the change in the atmosphere as the zombies in this movie emit some sort of green gas from their mouths which in turn is whats causing the zombie plague. Through a series of mishaps it is discovered that the blood of the zombies is combustible and can be used as a sort of fuel. In a Sam Raimian like manor the survivors build an engine that harnesses the gas directly from the zombies mouths to power their death-mobile to take their road show of carnage to the living dead! All the while Brooke is being held hostage in a portable mad science lab under the care of a crazy disco doctor who dances and sings maniacally as he experiments on humans and zombies alike! Through creepy disco doctor's blood transfusions from zombies to humans, Brooke begins to have the ability to control the zombies as she becomes true queen of the undead! This leads to some awesome action sequences where you guessed it, the military become the main antagonists and our heroes use their new found discoveries and abilities to combat the government! While these aspects are never fully explained, they are done so awesomely you just don't really care and go with the flow! The third idea brought to the table is the movies name Wyrmwood, which itself is taken from the bible and gives the plague a biblical hypothesis as well as a scientific one which I will let you discover for yourself!
This is a fun crazy ride but a majority of it is tonally serious and especially for the character of Berry heart wrenching. I was not expecting the tone of this movie to be so serious as you get pretty in depth with some of the characters and their lives leading up to and during the plague. It is in these moments that when things get too serious there is usually a joke or a side gag that pops up to break the tension and it works well to remind you of the absurdity of the situations and laugh at them but also has enough depth to make you care for the characters and situations. 
I had heard this film took four years to make, because it could only be shot on weekends. For a movie with no big names and such a long strenuous shoot, this film itself looks rather beautiful as each scene seems very carefully lit to reflect the emotions needed to represent it. Not to mention the gadgets and stunts within the movie are phenomenal! It's basically one giant car chase down the road leading up to an epic battle at the end where we get a fist fight because these Aussies are so badass they don't even need guns! I hope there's a sequel called Queen of Wyrmwood all about Brooke and her horde of zombie pets taking people out as they go because she was a total badass! Dear Wyrmwood I give you my love of Ozploitation! 29 Days til' Halloween Halloween! 29 Days til' Halloween! Silver Shamrock!
