TURNING POINT movie poster | ©2026 Lionsgate

Rating: R
Stars: Jillian Lee Garner, Mike Apple, Shane Brady, Lydia Hearst, Sanchita Malik, DJ Qualls, Sasha Higgins, Pamela Guest, Mike Duff, Nora Yates
Writer: Joshua D. Wagner
Director: Joshua D. Wagner
Distributor: Lionsgate
Release Date: August 25, 2026 (digital, VOD)

Nobody should be robbing anybody’s house. That said, the absolute worst time to attempt burglary is when the homeowner is not only there, but in the midst of turning into a zombie.

This is the premise of TURNING POINT, a generally decent if uneven horror movie, written and directed by Joshua D. Wagner.It begins with black-and-white images of cells dividing and recombining under a microscope. Then we’re in color footage in a suburban home, where little Margot (Nora Yates) is terrified by the man (Mike Duff) in the living room. He’s in a wheelchair, hooked up to an I.V. drip and a breathing mask – and he’s her dad.

When Dad begins crying bloody tears, we assume he’s somewhere in the middle of transitioning into one of the living dead. No, he’s just really sick.

We’ll stipulate that there are some real-world diseases that can cause blood to leak from human eyes, but in this context, it’s very confusing. When now-adult Margot (Jillian Lee Garner) wakes up from the nightmare we just saw, we spend a good while thinking, “Ah, she’s got experience dealing with zombies,” but no, she’s just generally easily frightened.

Margot’s newish boyfriend Pilot (Shane Brady) seems agreeable enough and makes an okay impression on Margot’s alcoholic mom Julie (Sasha Higgins).

Pilot turns out to have an amiable customer/supplier relationship with local drug dealer Eli (Mike Apple), who lives in middle-class suburban respectability. Eli is sad that his wife McKayla (Lydia Hearst) has taken their little daughter and left after discovering that the family is not, as Eli claimed, supported by canny investments.

A bit conveniently (but okay, we’ll allow it), Eli’s next-door neighbor Casper (DJ Qualls) has his own podcast about zombies. Eli never misses an opportunity to mock Casper about his hobby.

Then Eli goes out to sell to a skittish client at night in a local park that houses a disreputable CDC facility, the site of a number of zombie sightings that have made their way to Casper.

Meanwhile, Pilot and Margot are out on a date, having fun while they’re both high on Eli’s product. Knowing that Eli is out on the job and that his family is elsewhere, Pilot thinks this would be the ideal time to break into Eli’s house and steal from his safe. Since Margot is under the influence and Pilot, again, appears to be reasonable, she agrees.

We can in some measure guess where all of this is going. Part of what’s good about TURNING POINT is that a number of characters go through changes that are in personality rather than in biology. Apple is especially good at handling Eli. Qualls – who also nailed it as a zombie-apocalypse podcaster on the five seasons of the Syfy Channel series Z NATION – displays his expertise in playing someone who has grown comfortable with his outsider status, capable of going both full geek and credible philosopher.

TURNING POINT trips itself up to an extent in a few places. Given how events unfold, there is one character we should know more about before things go bonkers, and an epilogue introduces another character who is implausibly incurious, even in the name of the filmmakers wanting to move along to the ending.

The biggest flaw, however, is in an effects makeup design. The zombie infection phase makeup is excellent, and if the filmmakers had simply stuck with it into reanimation, that would have been entirely acceptable. Instead, the design for the actual undead is too different and too over the top to be effective.

TURNING POINT has its charms and its flaws. Which turn out to be more important will be in the eye of the beholder.

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