The Colony - DVD

Content: In a not-too-distant future, a new ice age has wiped out most of humanity. The few survivors have rescued themselves beneath the surface of the earth. Here they have created small colonies where they are provided food, medicine, and shelter from the deadly cold. But even the colonies offer no protection from disease and self-destructive behavior of their inhabitants. And so now only colonies 5 and 7 remain populated. Briggs (Laurence Fishburne), the leader of Colony 7, tries everything to protect the people he feels responsible for. And as such, anyone who shows signs of illness must be quarantined immediately. If the disease cannot be contained with medication, the sick must leave the colony or be shot. For Mason (Bill Paxton), the latter in particular is the only real option, as he wants to do everything in his power to prevent life in his colony from soon becoming impossible. And so it is Mason who tries to convince Briggs not to respond to a distress call as Colony 5, so as not to put more lives at risk. Nevertheless, Briggs, along with Sam (Kevin Zegers) and young Graydon (Atticus Mitchell), make the perilous journey through icy cities and rough landscapes to Colony 5 - where they make a gruesome discovery...

With The Colony, director Jeff Renfroe has staged an apocalyptic doomsday thriller that mixes set pieces from the John Carpenter classic The Thing with elements from 30 Days of Night or Roland Emmerich's The Day after Tomorrow to create a suspenseful whole. To be sure, Renfroe only succeeds to a very limited extent in freshening up the story with his own impulses. But even though the whole thing has a high recognition value and only a very low surprise factor, The Colony isn't really boring at any moment. The opening sequence in particular, showing the lives of the few survivors in Colony 7, is very engagingly directed and makes the desperation and will to survive of the small community easy to understand.

When Briggs and Sam leave the colony and make their way through the world covered in ice and snow, the low budget Renfroe had to work with becomes quite apparent. The special effects simply can't compete in the top league. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic ice world that the team has designed here with relatively small means, can really be seen and provides some more than decent show values. And when pure horror breaks out in the seemingly abandoned Colony 5, then also the friends of the somewhat harder pace get their money's worth.

Although this is not really new, Renfroe's production is tight enough to still be able to create good tension. The convincing actors, first and foremost a usually confident Laurence Fishburne and an emotionally undercooled Bill Paxton, further raise the entertainment value. Towards the end, however, the story runs out of steam dramaturgically and Renfroe relies too much on the bloody shock effects here. These are initially very entertaining for horror fans, but in the end can not really hide the script weaknesses.

But even if The Colony may be far from being a perfect film, atmospheric and exciting entertainment offers the flick all the time. So if you like gritty end-time horror with some compelling visuals and quite gory effects, you should definitely check out Colony 7. Worth seeing!

Picture + Sound: Since only a data-reduced press sample was available for testing, no rating can be given here about the final picture and sound quality.

Extras: Also the bonus material could not be sighted on the press disc. For the purchase variant a look behind the scenes is announced.

Conclusion: The Colony is an apocalyptic horror thriller, which uses primarily well-known genre elements, but which combines them in a very entertaining and exciting way to an entertaining whole. Despite a relatively low budget, the production shot in Canada can convince visually as well as acting. No masterpiece of the end time horror film, but for a thrilling home cinema evening the film offers enough successful moments. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp