After making his mark with underrated fantasy horror Knights of Badassdom and Salma Hayek’s single-location shoot ’em up Everly, Joe Lynch was well on his way to cultivating a reputation for directing high concept genre-benders that packed the potential to attain to cult favorite status, but 2017’s Mayhem also happened to be a widely-acclaimed triumph.
The best-reviewed feature of his entire career by some distance, it may not have been his intention to invite comparisons to a pair of the greatest action movies ever made, but the similarities were there for all to see. Any high concept flick featuring a protagonist trapped in a building overcoming insurmountable odds is going to draw Die Hard analogies, while the prospect of seeing them fight upwards toward an end-of-level boss on the top floor is ripped right from Gareth Evans’ mind-blowing The Raid.
Throw in a zombie twist after Steven Yeun and Samara Weaving end up dealing with the immediate transformations their co-workers are suffering from due to the ID-7 mutation, and it’s an intoxicating blend of action, horror, thriller, and jet-black comedy that fully deserves its Certified Fresh rating of 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that Mayhem was destined for cult status from the second the logline was revealed, because there’s no way it wasn’t going to appeal to at least one cross-section of any given fandom. Sure enough, an outpouring of appreciation on Reddit has highlighted that the unsung and underseen gem didn’t just understand the assignment, but knocked it clean out of the park.