Apparently, the "Z" in JeruZalem (I'm capitalising it because it's done that way in all the posters and box art for this movie) is supposed to stand for "zombies". Umm. There are no zombies in this movie - and no, I don't think I'm being pedantic here. While the primary monsters in this film are described as the resurrected dead, they have leathery wings and don't act like zombies very much at all. They're really more like the creatures in Lamberto Bava's Demons, which makes sense because that's what they're clearly meant to be - demons. But enough of my minor obsessive habit of correcting zombie definitions in movies (I really am working to get over it).
Sarah and Rachel are two American girls who are going on holiday to Tel Aviv. On the plane, however, they meet an anthropology graduate student named Kevin and decide to take a brief detour to Jerusalem with him before going on to the beaches of Tel Aviv. Kevin is particularly interested in angel mythologies, which is why he is visiting Jerusalem, the heart of no less than three religions that have angels in their belief systems. As he looks into Jerusalem's history more and more however he becomes convinced that something terrible is going to happen very soon. This gets him diagnosed with Jerusalem syndrome and locked up in an asylum for a few days - but surprise surprise, he was right and suddenly Jerusalem is filled with demons and/or the resurrected dead, and even a couple of giants. Sarah, Rachel and their new friends now have to survive and escape the city before they close it off in an attempt to contain the apocalypse...;
It sounds a bit like a bad joke, doesn't it? A Christian, a Jew and a Muslim walk into a Biblical Apocalypse... JeruZalem is only the fourth Israeli horror film, and the second film to center - or at least claim to center - around zombies. Obviously, it is also mostly set in and around the city of Jerusalem. (Incidentally, I reviewed the first Israeli horror film, Rabies, in 2014.) And two things that the film does well is showcasing the beauty and architecture of Jerusalem and how its citizens, adherents of the three Abrahamic religions manage to live together in (more or less) peaceful harmony. While there are some tensions, for the most part they are all forgotten when everyone parties together, or later on try to escape the apocalypse together.
JeruZalem is a found-footage movie, but rather than have someone carrying a camera and filming everything despite the chaos of an apocalypse apparently happening around them, our recording device in this film is a pair of We're-Not-Calling-Them-Google Glasses. This at least gives a valid excuse for the main character to be filming everything despite what's going on (she needs them to see and loses her regular glasses early in the film), although it doesn't do much for the inevitable shaky-cam that rears its head in hectic scenes. It also gives the film a few moments to try for some quirky humour - some moments works, such as when the glasses malfunction and start playing music while they're all running in terror from the demon-zombies (demonbies?); others fall rather flat and come across as more corny than anything, such as the main character's father messaging her and calling her his "good, sweet girl" while she's getting it on with her anthropologist boyfriend.
JeruZalem's biggest problem, however, is that it promises much but doesn't deliver on as much. It certainly starts off strong enough, with a cine-film flashback to a demon being exorcised and then shot by holy men from all three major religions in 1972... but after that we get nearly half a film's worth of travelogue and partying before the demonbies and apocalypse-in-the-making pop up again. And once things do kick off, we still don't see nearly as much of these demons and other monsters as we might like. We rarely seem to see more than a couple of the demonbies at a time, which I think both wastes their relatively original design (I liked the imagery of the torn, leathery wings), and rather neuters their potential for being truly scary. What felt even worse for me was that there were a couple of moments in the film where we catch short glimpses of the military fighting giant monsters that are apparently lumbering around the city, but we get nothing else said or seen about them. No comment, no references - not even a, "Holy shit guys, did anyone else see that?" as they rush past. And personally, I'd have likely to have known more about the giant monsters - apocalypses featuring zombies or zombie-likes are ten-a-penny, but giant monster apocalypses are still an somewhat untapped subgenre.
In the end, JeruZalem is far from terrible, but it could have been so much better as well. It did manage to throw a plot curveball with a plot point that had been built up throughout the film but took a left turn at the very last minute, which was an impressive surprise, but in the end I just think that it didn't do enough with the material it had to work with. If it's a biblical apocalypse, have a rain of blood or frogs as well as the demonbies and giants (but don't have a plague of darkness because we don't want another movie shot mostly in night vision). Show us a horde or two, not just isolated clusters of demonbies that can be taken down with some weapons fire. Apparently a sequel is in the works - it will be set ten years after the events of this film, where the military have managed to contain things by building a big dome around the city (again, a wasted opportunity for giants there) and will utilise VR technology. We shall have to wait and see how this next film turns out.
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