Imagine a border patrol trying to shake off a bunch of hungry zombies that climb barbed wires and get through small holes in the wall. And no, they are not migrants infected with a germ-warfare weapon, but the U.S soldiers having been used as a sort of paying guinea in an experiment to become more violent. A mutant zombie army, of course.

And the ones who are able to stop them, since they need to survive, are a Mexican drug lord  (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and his son (Nery Arredondo). 

Produced by Mexican Dynamo and Red Creek Productions, the new series “Narco vs Zombies” will be released by Amazon Prime in 2020, and it's a weird and kind of chaotic sci-fi, horror, and action blend without any political or symbolic substrate – like many zombies series or movies such as “The Walking Dead” or “The Night of Living Dead” (1968). 

Because zombies, whether you like it or not, mean the worst part of globalization and social control: 

They are homeless. They can’t talk. They don’t have any community sense despite their herding behavior. Totally consumeristic, but their hunger isn’t longer glutted. They are our dehumanized doppelganger.

The eight-episode series written and produced by Nicolas Entel (“Pecados de mi padre”) and Miguel Tejadas (“Screamers”), and directed by Rigoberto Castañeda (“Diablero”), goes on reproducing the repetitive elements in action series and movies set across the border: drug war and military control, plus an abandoned rehab center as a touch of creativity.

It doesn’t, however, discover anything new further treating a narco as a hero… A poor favor.

The Mexican producers also use the “sicario” role to make more global a blockbuster production that is expected to reach 200 countries.

At “Narcos vs Zombies”, the Spanish actor Sergio Peris Mancheta (“Snowfall” and “Rambo: Last Blood”) embodies the drug lord Alonso Marroquín, who escapes from a maximum-security prison with his son Lucas and find refuge in Paradise, a remote rehab center in the U.S. border. Meanwhile, the zombies-soldiers attack the SWAT team that is seeking the Marroquins. And it starts a war between cartels and the uninfected U.S army against a multitude of zombies. 

A lot has been written about the Hollywood obsession with Latin American cartels and the huge popularity of figures such as Pablo Escobar thanks to Netflix and other platforms. However, Mexican producers play with the “sicario” role to promote a blockbuster production in 200 countries. If you add Peris-Mencheta in the role of a Mexican drug lord in a Mexican series – directed and produced by Mexicans – we can say without any fears that globalization, full of stereotypes and biased sights, is the only thing that can easily cross the border.