While INMATE ZERO's makers tried pretty hard to dress it up, INMATE ZERO is just a variant of a zombie movie. That's just the truth of it.
If you're a chef, there's about a million dishes that begin with mirepoix. Similarly, every zombie movie, in addition to its basic premise of living-dead people trying to eat living-living people (or just their brains if you happen to be a purist), also has at least 2 plot points: 1) an "origin story" to explain how zombies came to be and 2) some kind of (hopefully novel) contextual circumstance into which zombies are going to be arbitrarily injected in the hopes of flogging up some viewer interest in this hyper-overused story "idea". At this point you have to ask which is more "living-dead"? The story idea or the zombies?
For INMATE ZERO, the origin of the zombies is a medical experiment gone wrong because, you know, we've never heard that one before. And the "novel" contextual circumstance is a super isolated prison-island, a thousand miles from the nearest mainland shore.
The zombies in INMATE ZERO are of the, somewhat rarer, hyper-fast variety, very similar to 28 DAYS LATER. No drooling, slowly staggering extras here. Again, this isn't original; it's just a choice option out of the Big Book of Zombie Recipes.
For side dishes we have a few selfish and self-serving characters, a few heroic and self-sacrificing characters, and a whole truckload of redshirts for their gore possibilities. Because with 3 you get egg roll.
And for dessert we have the Post-Climax Surprise of the heroin suddenly turning up with the zombie disease just as the rescue helicopter takes off with her on it. I think this is supposed to imply that now the zombie disease is going to make it off the isolated island and infect the world. I hope I got that impression erroneously because that would make absolutely no sense for a half dozen reasons.
As run-of-the-mill zombie movies go, INMATE ZERO isn't half bad. Lots of gore, adequate acting, and a properly dark and brooding location. A little over-the-top in the melodramatic "you're just prisoner scum so we can mistreat you any way we want" department but that's sort of de rigueur, isn't it? INMATE ZERO is primarily limited by its premise and plot line; it can only rise so far before it's weighed down by its pedigree.
If you're the sort of person who actually thinks of a zombie movie as "entertainment", especially at this point in the history of moviemaking, I would think you would be at least satisfactorily happy with INMATE ZERO. I mean, you KNOW what this movie's entire shtick is from the get go. And Shakespeare didn't write no zombie stories, did he? To its genuine credit, INMATE ZERO actually DOESN'T drag its material any further into the mud than it already is intrinsically by engaging in crappy workmanship, so it gives you what it says on the tin. If you go into it with unreasonably high expectations then that's your fault.
I have given INMATE ZERO a 7/10 star rating. Do not mistake this to mean I thought it was a great movie or that I particularly liked it. For star ratings, I use a relative scale based on my impression of how close the movie came to being the movie it's makers intended it to be and how well it fits or ranks within its fundamental genre, which, of course in this case is zombie movies. INMATE ZERO, I am convinced, is exactly what it was intended to be. If you find it particularly disappointing then I would suggest that you should've known exactly what you were getting into when you decided to watch it and whatever problems you have with it are more a function of your bad judgment for picking it to watch than anything intrinsically wrong with INMATE ZERO itself.
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