The filming of a fashion documentary furnishes the pretext for a film crew to follow a group of college students around Youngstown, Ohio, on what turns out to be night the city is hit by a zombie plague. Unfortunately, those lured by the inviting sight of the zombie cyborg featured on the cover of The Zombinator are bound to be a bit disappointed, as no such creature actually appears in the film.
The title character (Joseph Aviel) is an Afghanistan veteran trying to save Youngstown and the United States from a military-industrial undead plot being executed on the ground by “war hero” the Colonel (Patrick Kilpatrick) and his team of greedy mercenaries. The young people, meanwhile, spend most of the movie whimpering, cowering, running, and trying not to get bitten.
The film crew’s presence in the story suggests a postmodern self-awareness on the part of The Zombinator‘s makers, but it also presents some puzzling questions. They seem to be an unusually caddish lot, even for movie industry professionals, considering that they continue to shoot with apparent indifference as their associates are attacked, neither lifting a finger to help during combat nor even alerting a group of sleeping girls as the zombies sneak up on them.
The Zombinator achieves an adequate level of suspense, even if the zombies and story are nothing new or particularly special; and occasionally bathetic humor offers a welcome break from the scenes of horror and mediocre action with CGI blood and fake gunfire. Shame on The Zombinator, though, for baiting the audience with the tasty prospect of a zombie-Terminator hybrid and instead delivering a regular old hungry carcass flick.
3 out of 5 stars.
[WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS]
Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Zombinator is:
9. Anti-tobacco. A cigarette is a “cancer stick”.
8. Racist! A horny black dude stupidly opens a door for some zombie sluts. Paranoid and self-absorbed congoids are apt to assume that even the basement of a Catholic school might be a secret hideout for the KKK. End credits feature a vicious ghetto zombie in a hoodie.
7. Anti-family. Marcus (Justin Brown) was abused by his father.
6. Class-conscious. The 1% gets name-dropped, as does the gentrification neighborhoods of Youngstown are said to be experiencing. “It’s more like civilized murder now.”
5. Anti-Christian. The Zombinator is generally irreverent toward Christianity. A rotten-faced rock singer wears a clerical collar; one Youngstowner recalls seeing a bullet hole in a church bathroom; and priests (one of whom smokes) are ineffective at thwarting zombies. God, meanwhile, is “the one who’s got the biggest dividends.”
4. Anti-Y. Generation Y appears as a wimpy, idiotic, and superficial lot, the Colonel’s suggestion that they are truly “the greatest generation” coming across as masked sarcasm.
3. Anti-cronyism/anti-Obama. “But what about change?” cries a stupid liberal on learning that she and her friends are guinea pigs in a government bio-terror scheme. “What about what everybody voted for, against big corporations?”
2. Antiwar. America’s rulers preside over an empire, not a progressive wonderland, and ignorant young people’s mindless mouthing of patriotic admiration for soldiers rings unmistakably hollow. Afghanistan is a testing ground for biological agents, with soldiers used for deadly experiments.
1. Anti-state and N.W.O.-alarmist, promoting those darned conspiracy theories. “This is government shit, dude,” suspects one of the filmmakers. “If the world doesn’t see this, this is gonna happen everywhere else, too.” Later, the Zombinator explains that, “They have a cure, but they will not use it until it gets so big, after Youngstown is gone, and then they’ll present it on the market and make billions . . . billions and billions on your corpses.” So forget that crap in Contagion (2011) and World War Z (2013) about the valiant public servants over at the CDC and the WHO. This is the real deal.
icareviews 
Ever wonder if God’s favorite kids are planning a zombie apocalypse for us? That crap has certainly been a feature in popular movies for years now.
I think 9/11 and the Bush/Obama years as a whole have had Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, understanding – if only subconsciously – that America is in a downward spiral, and movies during these years, like Children of Men, Elysium, Oblivion, the Resident Evil series, and any number of zombie movies, have reflected apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic visions largely for these reasons: the terror bogey, economic contraction, unemployment, Sodom-and-Gomorrah cultural putrescence, desert military quagmires, and demographic decline. World War Z, in particular, conveys encrypted liberal anxieties about the multiculturalist monster they’ve unleashed (Richard Spencer has a good talk about that on YouTube). I do think, though, that movies like that one and Contagion are (no doubt for nefarious reasons) directing viewers to put an unwarranted trust in public health officials in the event of an epidemic.
Link to Richard Spencer’s talk?
I suppose a lot of our concerns are expressed in cinema on some level, but I’m not a big fan of film so naturally I don’t pick up on that. I have, however, noticed that many people have developed a more ‘fatalistic’ sense of humor and most parent’s no longer have such high hopes for their childrens’ futures, being content merely with their survival, and ‘staying out of trouble’.
Here’s Spencer on World War Z: