LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Claire Dunne One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

acuhlian There is no entertainment value in this movie what so ever. Nothing happens until at the very end she jumps off the roof. Amazing ending to cap off a horrible movie.

beholder23 Underrated Masterpiece. I really enjoyed Schwarzenegger in this role. He looks so depressed and tired. In maybe 100 years future critiques will look back to this movie and will see it as one of the most important zombie movies of all time. Not concerning its impact, but for its artistic value. It is moving slowly - together with a great Schwarzenegger performance - slow, sad, grotesque, disturbing, and brilliant. Watch it. (but if you are looking for an action-packed Zombie-film, look somewhere else). Then this movie is not for you.

David Cox This film is bleak and ultimately pretty boring. Unfortunately. Because I like the premise and the take on the zombie genre.The premise is simple: Arnie plays Wade, a farmer/father just trying to look after his daughter after she gets bitten by a zombie and begins the multiple week transformation into a zombie. This creates the chance for the nuance of the zombie genre to really flex its metaphorical undertones and really have a slow paced and personal look at the ramifications of dehumanising someone into a monster. I dig the hell out of that. Zombies are more than just flesh eating creatures and this takes a dig at trying to explore how transformations destroy relationships, the community, and even the person dealing with their inevitable loss of personhood. It becomes a story analogous to knowing your loved one will die of a terminal illness in two weeks and the hardship that causes.Unfortunately this brilliant idea gets bogged down in utterly dull banality. It's. Just. So. Dull. It took me I think 15 minutes before the thought occurred to me: this must be a first time director. And it is! The pacing is so off. I decided to watch it because it was only an hour and a half (and not including credits it's less than that) so figured hey, nice quick movie to enjoy at the end of the day. Nah. What ensues is a director more focused on silent inconsistently shaky shots of characters (mostly Arnie) brooding and having some kind of internal struggle over some super important element of the story but after the hundredth artsy cut away shot or silent 20 second scene it feels like this just didn't have enough content for a full length film. It's soooo sllooowwww. I checked MULTIPLE TIMES to see how much time I had left until the end because I just wanted this to be over but I'd invested too much time to give up on it. I wanted it to redeem itself. I wanted it to lift itself up out of the bland drudge through the slow decay of Abigail Breslin's character (the titular Maggie) into something more poignant, or at least... interesting. But it doesn't. Any tension by the end and replaced with frustration. You know where this is going the moment it starts.The characters aren't interesting. Arnie plays a father figure. That's... about it. What does he like? He likes keeping his daughter around. There's a scene where they actually seem to bond with each other and are a proper father/daughter duo. The rest I don't care. All the other characters? Well I have the cast list open in a separate tab in case I feel like checking names because I don't know a single one. I can't think of any defining traits about these people besides the archetypes they're meant to fit into for the sake of narrative elements. There's the... (switches tab) step-mother? Oh I thought she was her aunt. Caroline. Who... is just present for someone to be uncomfortable about the whole situation. There's the two cops (who Arnie clumsily reveals he is close friends with through heavy handed expositionary dialogue) who warn Arnie that they'll intervene if Maggie goes too far. They're interchangeable nobodies who exist to serve a single purpose and I feel no reason why who they are affects the plot in any way.The cinematography, much like my experience for an hour and a half, is bleak. The colour grading is overdone. It doesn't so much set the tone as demand you feel sad. We get it dude, you were a scene kid when a teenager. You're very excited to show us your latest film school project. It genuinely just feels like if someone slowed down a heavy metal music video but then removed all the music, sporadically added dialogue, then slowed it down way too much. It hurts me. It hurts me so bad.This movie is meant to have a soul. It really should and I know it wants to be a deep examination of a little girl losing her humanity before her eyes and the pain it's causing her father but he just comes off as distant and flat. This was a good draft that just never got rewritten to really hit the nail of all the ideas it was going for on the head.

jimbo-53-186511 During an outbreak of a disease in America's Midwest, a father Wade Vogel (Arnold Schwarzenegger)takes care of his daughter Maggie Vogel (Abigail Breslin) after she has been bitten by one of the infected. The disease slowly turns the infected into cannibalistic zombies and Wade stays by his daughter's side until the inevitable happens...As a rule of thumb, zombie films generally fall along the same sort of narrative lines; you will usually get the living trying to survive against the dead OR the living trying to find a cure for the outbreak (invariably both of these elements are sometimes melded together). However, Maggie is a different beast and is very much less clichéd in its narrative approach to a zombie apocalypse - it has more of a human drama feel to it rather than a race-against-time or a battle against zombies type feel to it. In some ways, this is good as the different angle to a familiar story does at least set it apart from the crowd, but that's really where the praise ends with this film...For a start, the whole story is quite far-fetched and rather hard to believe; we're expected to believe that the authorities would allow the infected to spend their final days with their families putting other non-infected neighbours or families at risk?? Why would this be allowed? Although the infected are effectively supposed to be under house arrest and heavy restrictions are supposedly put on where they can go and what they can do there is never any evidence that this is actually being policed properly?? It's a touching way to set the story up, but it's rather ludicrous and is something that I couldn't buy for one second...Even if you can suspend disbelief for the story then I'll think you'll have a much harder time forgiving the unbelievable tedium that is served up in this film. When I say that nothing happens throughout its 90 odd minute running time I'm not exaggerating - the film slowly shows Maggie getting more and more ill and there is one incident where she nearly gets attacked by the infected and one other occasion when she hangs out with other infected people, but other than these moments there's nothing memorable about this film. Some of the problems lie with the far-fetched script, but director Henry Hobson is also partly to blame for his rather lacklustre and lethargic direction (he seems to use mood music to manipulate the audience into feeling sad rather than achieving this by developing the characters and the story enough to make us give a damn). The only real hook with this film is waiting around to see if Maggie turns, but the film doesn't deliver in this respect either; given the way the story has been set up I didn't expect Maggie to turn on her family (and nor would I have wanted her to as it would have certainly cheapened the film), but still I wish that the film would have had more depth and perhaps explored Maggie's own struggles and her family's struggles trying to deal with her life-changing transformation.Despite the narrative offering a different outlook on coping with a zombie apocalypse, the filmmakers constantly shoot themselves in the foot by giving me a dull story with dull characters where virtually nothing happens and the cherry on the cake here is that there is no dramatic pay-off meaning that the film really is a waste of 90 minutes. It's only a relatively good performance from Abigail Breslin which is preventing the film from getting the minimum score.