Can’t see the video? Watch the Apocalypse Z: New World trailer on YouTube.
Prime Video has released the trailer for Apocalypse Z: New World (Apocalipsis Z: Nuevo Mundo back home), the Spanish sequel to 2024’s Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End. It brings the news that when the dead finally rise and Europe falls, the continent’s last surviving civilisation will make its stand in the Canary Islands. So, roughly the place a sizeable chunk of Britain already retreats to every February, only with more machine guns and fewer all-inclusive wristbands.
The set-up is this. Following the outbreak of the TSJ virus, that rabies-adjacent plague from the first film, the islands have become Europe’s final refuge. A special mission sets out for the ravaged mainland in search of vital supplies, and Roberto (Carlos Alcaide) joins the team with what Amazon’s own synopsis cheerfully describes as questionable intentions. Anybody who has watched a zombie film since 1968 will recognise both ingredients. The supply run is where good plans go to be eaten, from the Monroeville Mall to the abandoned London of 28 Weeks Later, and the new bloke with a hidden agenda is as much a fixture of the genre as the shotgun with exactly one shell left. The publicity promises a desperate race for survival between the hordes of infected and divided loyalties, capped with the eternal question of whether to save yourself or risk everything for what little humanity remains. Harry Cooper, last seen refusing to come up from the cellar in Night of the Living Dead, would like his answer on record.
The reason we’re getting a second helping is simple arithmetic. The first film, adapted from Manel Loureiro’s novels (which started life as a blog before going on to bestseller status), was a surprisingly melancholy affair about a grieving widower, played by Francisco Ortiz, sitting out the end of the world indoors with his cat. It went to number one on Prime Video in 89 countries within days of its Halloween 2024 launch and, by Amazon’s reckoning, became the service’s most-watched international Original film, beaten only by the Spanish stepsibling romance Your Fault. Which tells you something about the global audience: it will cheerfully put up with the collapse of civilisation, but it will not be denied a brooding love interest.
Carles Torrens, who also made the first film and before that the deeply nasty Pet, is back in the director’s chair, with a screenplay by Ángel Agudo and Nostromo Pictures producing. The cast includes Carlos Alcaide, Julia Martínez, Mónica López, Tamara Casellas, Santiago Vaca Narvaja, Axel Medrano, Pedro Hernández, Javier Godino, Ujin Moreno and Mario Mayo, with José María Yazpik returning as the ally Pritchenko and Berta Vázquez back as Lucía, the nurse barricaded inside a hospital. The real headline, though, is that Pedrito, the cat who plays Lúculo, has also signed on. Every franchise needs its marquee name, and this one appears to be a moggy who has survived a zombie apocalypse with his dignity intact, which is more than can be said for most of the human cast of the 1980s Italian zombie cycle. Amazon is pitching the sequel as an ensemble piece with more action, and the stills of soldiers piling out of aircraft and drawing a bead on a corridor full of the infected suggest the quiet, cat-on-the-windowsill mood of the first film is being swapped for something closer to a military sortie.
Spain has serious form in this department, of course. This is the country that gave us Amando de Ossorio’s eyeless Templar knights trotting out of their tombs in slow motion in Tombs of the Blind Dead, co-produced Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (shot, splendidly, in the Peak District), and unleashed [REC] on an unsuspecting apartment block. Here at SFcrowsnest we have a soft spot for that lineage, so it’s fitting that New World gets its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival on 10 October, the town where Spanish genre cinema goes to be appreciated by people who know exactly what they’re looking at.
Apocalypse Z: New World arrives exclusively on Prime Video on 30 October, in more than 240 countries and territories, a full day earlier than last year’s Halloween slot. Anyone with a winter week in Tenerife already booked may wish to reread the small print on their travel insurance, and perhaps pack a crowbar next to the factor 50.
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