I have no trouble with low budget films. No trouble either with off the formula stories. Some the most creative work is done with low budgets, and breaking formula is often good.
Obsessions with character arcs, closure, etc make for poor story writing , but some aspects of story telling formula are in fact necessary. Those aspects include some level of credible or believable climax and anti climax and some level of characters being consistent absent anything in the story showing why they would change.
This film is just outright terrible throughout and the climax is just, well complete BS.
This film is low budget combined with every lowbrow cliché imaginable.
Do you need to be a survivalist to write in the Zombie genre? No. But you certainly need to think out your story, and do a bit of research not to make yourself a laughing stock. That people would go to the woods in a post apocalyptic scenario is credible, but not because it would be a good place to survive, but because that is where idiots would go. To be making unneeded campfires (ie showing every threat exactly where you are) , handling and using firearms with no basic skills or common sense, to foraging in places with no likely forage completes the idiocy.
That leaves the interplay between characters. Frankly it is terrible and juvenile. Without getting into spoilers here, the interactions throughout are childish, and the ending is simply a cheat on the audience.
Lastly a whole lot of the positive reviews of this film , virtually all of them are from single review posters. This is the problem with IMDb removing its comment boards, as there is no place to quickly leave an note that the reviews are clearly shilled. They are. Frankly, there is more imagination and creativity in those positive reviews than in the film. The creative team for this film should have had their buddies write the film instead of trying to upshill it here!