Writer: Bart Ruspoli
Director: Mark McQueen
Our Future Has One Hope
Devil’s Playground is a London based zombie movie famous for taking running zombies to the extreme: these ones run, jump and climb!
Any zombie movie set in London is bound to draw comparison with 28 Days Later (2002), but a better description of Devil’s Playground would be Resident Evil (2002) crossed with EastEnders. A pharmaceutical company, N-Gen, creates a ‘performance enhancing’ drug that has a nasty side-effect of turning people into bloodthirsty zombies. One of the test subjects, Angela (MyAnna Buring), was unaffected and the storyline is driven by N-Gen mercenary Cole (Craig Fairbrass) trying to locate her in the hope that a cure can be found.
Apart from being London-centric the other USP of Devil’s Playground is that the zombies don’t just run, they free run (parkour). Over cars, fences, walls, whatever. This is actually an interesting concept – once you accept that zombies can run then the lack of fear or pain would allow them to do things ordinary people wouldn’t. Many of the traditional safe hideouts from an uprising would become vulnerable to zombies that could leap across rooftops for instance. Unfortunately this aspect of the zombies is barely explored and ends up being rather wasted.
Most of the screen time is instead given to Fairbrass and Danny Dyer two actors better known for their accents than the subtlety of their performances. This, combined with some truly awful dialogue, gives the film a surreal Eastenders feel. There’s a scene where one character tells another that she’s pregnant at the end of which I fully expected to hear the soap’s closing credit beats.
There’s little actual story and what there is gets told in a disjointed, confusing manner. Presumably we’re meant to be more interested in the characters but I found them dull and unpleasant. The males spend most of their time in macho posturing and/or violence and the main female character, Angela, is little more than a walking plot device. The best characterisation comes from supporting actors, Colin Salmon as the evil CEO and Jamie Murray as the manipulative Lavinia. Much of the dialogue is laughable and the only moment of apparently intentional humour comes in the very final scene.
Overall Devil’s Playground is a pretty poor film, yet for some reason I quite enjoyed it. Maybe it’s because has no pretensions, it knows what it is: a boys’-night-in DVD with plenty of action and testosterone. And on that level it works. But if, as I suspect, the filmmakers were hoping to launch a new franchise then this one isn’t going anywhere.