The Asylum never met a trend they didn’t hop on to for all the moolah in the world. Since zombies are all the rage and have become something of a culture in the world, The Asylum naturally jumps on the bandwagon to offer up their own view of what the world would look like under the rule of the walking dead. Or “zombies” as the characters call them. This time around director Nick Lyon is at the helm and brings us a movie that is not so much an original film so much as it is a pastiche of better sub-genre offerings.
What we see in “What Lies Ahead” is a group of people trying to prove someone wrong. At the end of the first season they were told by Doctor Jennings from the CDC that there is nothing in the world, and there is simply no hope. Which is why he attempted to commit suicide with the group aboard.
With “The Walking Dead” being perhaps one of the biggest television hit in years, it was only obvious AMC television would rush out a box set of the entire first season of “The Walking Dead.” I can’t imagine it took them very long since the first season of the 2010 hit series is only six episodes, but that’s only the norm for AMC who practices a formula of six trial episodes leading in to a hopeful second and third season of thirteen episodes. It happened with “The Killing” and they also practiced the formula for “Breaking Bad,” two truly genius series.
The Ford Brothers have obviously come from the school of Romero with “The Dead,” a film that touts itself as one of the first South African zombie movies ever released. It strives to bring audiences the genre that Romero built in its most traditional sense as a zombie movie where the living must fight to ward off the walking dead, all of whom lumber and groan at the sight of fresh meat. There’s not a runner to be found, which should please traditionalists looking for a dread filled good time and the Ford brothers seemed to have been fed on a strict diet of Romero’s films as their monstrous zombies actually walk in rigomortis stricken pale bodies that turn them in to rather omnipotent and menacing beings.