Horror Movie Review: Osombie (2012)

Directed by John Lyde, written by Kurt Hale, and starring Corey Sevier, Eve Mauro and Jasen Wade, Osombie has to be a comedy horror, right? Right!? RIGHT!?

A group of NATO special forces on a special assignment in Afghanistan team up with Dusty, a yoga instructor. Who is there to find her conspiracy theorist brother Derek. Who is there because he believes Bin Laden is still alive.

It turns out he’s right. Osama Bin Laden isn’t dead. At least in the conventional sense. He’s undead and making an army of zombie terrorists in the heart of Afghanistan.

It sounds absurdly silly, it sounds like a comedy, and it sounds like a movie that you shouldn’t take seriously for even a second. So, it’s one hell of a surprise to find that Osombie is taking itself incredibly seriously. This story, this idea, and all the controversies that surround it, is played as straight as possible.

Which, as ridiculous as that is, isn’t the movie’s biggest problem.

It’s biggest problem is that it is boring, bland, and banal. The three bs that you never want any horror movie to be. From the special forces team members that have about as much depth as a rain puddle, to the idiocy of Dusty and her brother Derek even being in Afghanistan, to the cringe-inducing portrayal of Taliban fighters, everything Osombie does, it fails at.

There are two points in particular where most might find themselves having had enough and reaching for the off button. The first is the film’s hilarious attempt to make the death of one of the special forces a sad moment with some of the most ‘what the?’ bits of dialogue. The other is the far more questionable idea of having a character bringing in the real horror experienced by emergency responders in the 9/11 attacks.

It’s a bad idea to do this, which is how the entire film could be summarised, if it was at all worth the time an effort to sit through it. It’s simply so plain and so boring that it’s not even worth debating a lot of this.

It might have fared better if it was going for a comedy angle. You’re a film called Osombie, suggesting that Bin Laden came back from the dead and is making a zombie terrorist army, how can it take itself so damn seriously!?