Crew
Director/Screenplay – B. Harrison Smith, Story – B. Harrison Smith & David Sywenski, Producers – David J. Bonner, Brian Gallagher, Connie Roberts & B. Harrison Smith, Photography – Charlie Anderson, Music – John Avarese, Visual Effects Supervisor – Joseph J. Lawson, Visual Effects – Lawson Digital Arts, Makeup Effects Designer – Angie Johnson, Production Design – Malorie Folino. Production Company – Trainer Enterprises.
Cast
Billy Zane (Seller), Brian Gallagher (Rory Jacobs/Masten), Brian Anthony Wilson (Doc), Felissa Rose (Lia), Mischa Barton (Toni), Gabrielle Stone (Nikki Slater), Dee Wallace (Sharon Sommers), Michael Kean (Ian), Joe Raffa (Manning), Ashley Summer (Kennedy), Kyle Patrick Brennan (Stoller), Angel Anthony Marrero (Dutra), Davy Raphaely (Radler), Alexander Mandell (Nolan)
Plot
A zombie virus has swept the country. In the town of Elwood, the locals, driven by the fundamentalist preacher Lia, keep this at bay. The infected are banished beyond the gates where they are hunted by the army of former paintballers led by Seller. Meanwhile, Nikki is pregnant and is uncertain if the child is going to be born normal or infected.
Zombie Killers Elephants Graveyard was the fifth film as director for B. Harrison Smith. Smith had previously directed Camp Dread (2014) and subsequently made Death House (2017), the non-genre comedy Garlic & Gunpowder (2017), and the horror films The Special (2020), Where the Scary Things Are (2022), Fatal Detour (2025), Trope (2025), even a couple of Christmas-themed film, as well as wrote the interesting The Fields (2011) and the incoherent 6 Degrees of Hell (2012).
In the mid-2000s, there was a massive upsurge of zombie films following successes like Resident Evil (2002), 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). (For a full listing see Zombie Films). It wasn’t too far into the revival before the zombie genre started to take a turn for the non-serious and offer up a series of parodies or gonzo title mash-ups.
With most zombie films these days, my feeling is that the genre is so tapped out both in terms of serious and non-serious efforts that it is an uphill battle to find something interesting in when it comes to a new effort. Zombie Killers Elephants Graveyard (where Elephants is either ‘elephants’ or ‘elephant’s’ depending on whether you watch the opening or end credits), you are not sure what it has to offer beyond a novelty title.
The set-up could be interesting. The story vies between several different plotlines. There is the small community, which is the sort that could be guaranteed to be encountered every season on The Walking Dead (2010-22), who banishes the infected beyond their walls into a playground where Billy Zane leads a team of former paintballers (!) as they hunt and play soldier. There are other plotlines – Brian Gallagher as a man who keeps an infected wife and Felissa Rose who leads a fundamentalist church where she decries him from the pulpit for this; Mischa Barton as a pregnant woman unsure what her baby is going to turn out to be; and assorted other plotlines with an aging Dee Wallace, a bully who has interests in Gabrielle Stone and her young love affair with a fellow paintballer.
With the very scope of a plot that covers so many concurrent plotlines, you feel that Zombie Killers Elephants Graveyard should have been something epic. It even manages to rein in several moderately well-known name stars – Billy Zane, Mischa Barton – and those with genre cachet – Dee Wallace, Felissa Rose. Only the film never quite gels.
For one, there are far too many plotlines going on, which drags the film out to a 104-minute runtime that feels a lot longer than it is. The story switches between the various ongoing strands where you are not sure which of the numerous characters on screen you are meant to be following. And there are far too many questions left unanswered – what is the nature of the virus? What is going on with the townspeople banishing some of the infected beyond the gates and others being castigated for keeping some people (some of which is made clear as the film goes on)? It is not quite clear here the difference between those who appear infected and those who actually are. Nor was reference to the whole elephant’s graveyard aspect and how it affected the zombies made clear to me. All before an ending where the survivors encounter out of the blue those who seem to have developed some kind of antidote to the infection.
You could see Zombie Killers Elephants Graveyard as the middle episode of a series that sketched out the development of these ideas. As it is, we have a film that hits the ground requiring a lot of assumptions about its world that we are meant to pick up as we go along. B. Harrison Smith’s direction is competent but unremarkable, although he does at least deliver a good climactic bloodbath as the zombies overrun the town. The truth though is that in a heavily overmined genre, there is little here that draws you into the film and holds your attention.
Trailer here