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‘Why are you after me?’

The latest movie out of the Del Toro Films stable is billed as a kind of Argentinian Mad Max with zombies. And, yes, it’s easy to see the influence Georges Miller and A. Romero have had on I Am Toxic, but in the end does it match up to either director’s back catalogue?

Set in Buenos Aries in 2101, we begin with a man waking up amongst a collection of corpses (Esteban Prol). He’s in the middle of nowhere – then again, it looks like the whole place is the middle of nowhere now, a post-apocalyptic landscape where he has to scavenge boots to even walk. A symbol on his wrist is the only key to his identity, because it becomes very clear when he’s saved from a zombie attack by the mysterious ‘Father’ (Horacio Fontova) that he can’t remember a thing.

Taking him back to his shantytown, it isn’t long before the man – dubbed Dog by the others – is being beaten and tortured. Out of the frying pan… Released by a mute girl called simply Doll (Fini Bocchino), who takes her lead from Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, Dog returns to a location that feels familiar – where he can start to figure out what happened to him. But his captors are soon on his trail, hunting him until – somewhat predictably – the hunters become the hunted.

I Am Toxic takes the central premise of The Bourne Identity and transplants it to a ravaged future, which the movie only has a brief stab at explaining: something to do with the Southern Hemisphere becoming the world’s biggest garbage dump. And the zombies here, called ‘Dried Ones’, are the result of some kind of bacteriological war, or so we’re told. But there’s not really enough of them to warrant comparisons with Romero, nor is there enough mayhem with vehicles to dub it a Mad Max rip-off.

In fact, the film ploughs its own furrow in an entertainingly barking mad B-Movie way (complete with 70s horror movie soundtrack), and even some of the weird motivations are explained towards the end – you’ll probably have figured out by then what the twist is though, long before Dog pieces it all together. The last couple of seconds is virtually begging for a sequel, I’m just not sure where the makers would go with it. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to explore this world more and perhaps with a bigger budget.

Verdict: ‘Does it ring a bell?’ 6/10

Paul Kane