Directed by Australia based Kiah Roache-Turner, who co-wrote the script with his brother Tristan, and funded through a successful crowdsourcing campaign, Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead is a post-apocalyptic Mad Max style film that takes place in a world where a huge part of the Earth's population has been turned into zombies. How and why? Well a comet flew over the planet and started to break up and that caused some sort of disease to break out which eventually turned people into walking corpses. But honestly, the why and the how aren't that important here.

With the world being in the state that it's in, well, there aren't a lot of survivors around but there are a few, though those who have made it are constantly on the lookout for the resources they need to stay alive, fuel being a big one. One such survivor is a guy named Barry (Jay Gallagher). He travels the wilds of the scorched Earth with his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) in tow… until she gets kidnapped, that is. She's been nabbed by a well-armed group of survivalist types and brought to their boss, a mad doctor who experiments on the living. With Brooke his latest subject now playing human guinea pig, Barry does everything that he can to fight his way back to her. Meanwhile, the experiments that Brooke has been subjected to wind up having an interesting side effect in that she's now able to wield some sort of strange power over the shambling hordes that allow her to control them.

Fast paced and bloody, Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead is, in a world overcrowded with more zombie films than anyone really needs, a welcome breath of fresh air. While it definitely borrows from the Mad Max movies and from George A. Romero's Dawn and Day Of The Dead pictures, it still manages to do more than enough of its own thing to stand out. The concept isn't super complex but it's definitely effective in setting up plenty of wonderfully chaotic scenes of zombie mayhem, squibtastic shoot outs and crazy car stunts. It's those scenes, and the unbridled enthusiasm with which they've been cinematically assembled and captured, that make this one the fast paced kick in the head that it is.

Character development here is sufficient. Not overdone, though never particularly complex, just sufficient. And in a movie like this, that's good enough. Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead never reaches to be more than the genre hybrid that it is, and honestly you never want it to simply because it does what it does so well. The performances suit the characters well enough. Jay Gallagher as the male lead is a decent tough guy, or at least he turns out to be once forced into this situation, while beautiful Bianca Bradey is no slouch in the ass-kicking department either. Both leads are pretty fearless here, they've obviously got no problem getting dirty when the movie calls for it. The supporting players all add their own little bits and pieces or quirk and character to the cast as well.

A large part of the appeal of the film, however, is going to come from the effects work. The movie scores high points there as almost everything we see up on screen was done practically rather than digitally. This gives Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead a bit of a retro feel but in the best way possible, never where it feels like an homage or a knock off or even an attempt to capture a cinematic style of a past decade. The people behind the camera take things seriously enough that this never feels like a joke but the humor that is here, and obviously intentional, keeps the cinematic fun level plenty high. On top of that the movie is really nicely shot. There are some scenes where the camerawork is a little on the shaky side but there's a lot of great wide angel compositions here that really helps to create the right sort of look in how it captures the locations used for the shoot.

Video:

Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.78.1 widescreen. The movie looks great here. Shot digitally there's obviously no print damage to note and while the color timing has been intentionally tweaked for artistic effect, those colors are reproduced really nicely. Black levels are rock solid and while contrast has obviously been dialed up to give a few scenes a rather ‘hot' look there are no problems with any noticeable compression artifacts or crush. Edge enhancement is never a problem and detail is typically very strong as is texture. There's good depth here and all in all, the movie looks quite strong on Blu-ray