First off... along with Autopsy this is one of the of the 8 films to die for which I could sit through without falling asleep. Perkins'14 starts off very calm revolving around a cop who had his son abducted along with 13 other kids 10 years ago and can't let go. There is a lot of strange flashbacks inter-cut with the actual events where suddenly someone arrives at the police station who he considers to be the Abductor of the children ...from here it turns into mind-games between him and that guy named Perkins and by the title you can already guess that Mr. Cop is right about him. When a colleague searches Perkins house he finds a cellar with cages and his sudden death by one of the raging kids who were turned into blood lusting maniacs by 10 years of PCP-therapy. Now they are out in the streets on a rampage and we are up to a happy family re-union between the cop and his son ... or are we not??
What starts out slow and confusing (later you learn that its not confusing but pretty random) turns into a zombie-like movie with some pretty decent gore elements. The violence is depicted pretty raw and bloody and those kids are more a mix of instinct driven animals and zombies than anything else. They attack like the "28 days later" zombies, jump and run around, crawl air ducts, snap necks and disembowel with their bare hands. Thats nice, the visuals also carry it with some decent atmosphere. Problem is that the whole plot makes pretty little sense as of why Mr. Perkins engineers blood lusting zombie-kids on PCP and how they track down their kin and I really wonder how such obviously instinct driven creatures suddenly know how to use keys, shoot rifles etc. The whole ending is pretty idiotic and the movie should have rather focused on a logic plot and characters not acting like idiots (like a cop entering zombie infested crime scenes without a gun or his wife jingling key-chains like a crazy kid) instead of the massive bloodshed and bleak finale. Perkins'14 has really a lot going for it but smashes my hopes with a plot full of holes and dozens of ridiculous horror clichés.