DISCLAIMER: Our first Guest Post!
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2236182/
Starring: LeVar Burton, Danny Trejo, Mariel Hemmingway, French Stewart, No one else of any import
Review in a nutshell: Actors are people, too. They gotta eat.
Ask Jenn. I love bad movies. I mean, I really, really love bad movies. This movie was so bad, it was too much even for me. When I was done, I had to go watch Tom Selleck in goddamned Quigley Down Under to wash this out of my brain.
The movie starts off En Zombia Res, with a bunch of survivors fleeing a grisly random-actress-evisceration in a fairly posh (but decidedly Early Morning Empty) San Francisco neighborhood. Props to the folks at Asylum (yes, it’s an Asylum film, and yes, I should have known what I was getting in to, but I saw Burton and Trejo and said “It can’t be that bad, can it?” Brother, lemme tell ya…) for using a non-standard disaster-pocalypse location like Manhattan, Boston, or some other grossly over-destroyed East Coast location. Props for that. But not much else. The survivors all pile into Deus Ex SUV-ia brought by people… they were expecting these people I guess… who show up Just In Time, and then it’s off to Alcatraz!
I honestly expected Eddie Izzard’s bit from the prologue to Dressed To Kill to start playing. I really did. What I got was a high-speed wacky CGI death race of that previously mentioned SUV at breakneck speeds oh my god take that turn more carefully there’s a pregnant lady in the car down Lombard Street. Yes. The curviest street in the world. 90 mph SUV. Which then, of course, rolls. And rolls. And rolls some more. The SUV rolls around corners. It’s like Log. Only metal.
The movie has its moments. French Stewart plays a punchy, snarky bio-engineer type dude who states without reservation that if he’d had the funding, he could have prevented this sort of thing, and maybe found a cure before the world went to shit. “But noooooooo,” he proclaims while being aped by an ape sitting next to him. “You just had to have your budget cutbacks, didn’t you?”
The moments, however, are few. Worth it, but the time between them is spent wondering to yourself whether or not LeVar Burton is going to put this on his resume, and deciding that if he does, he’s a braver soul than any of us will ever be.
Where I found it: Netflix
How much I paid for it: 89 Minutes
Points of interest: The characters have to deal with a lot of really messed up things, like “what happens when an expecting mother is infected,” and all, which is good and rarely dealt with in these sorts of films. But many of the scenes seem to have been shot for the shock value, and too many characters just up and quit when they could be fighting.
The Money Shot: Danny Trejo Slow Motion Chainsaw Zombie Chase Scene. Say that five times fast.
Related Links:
Quigley Down Under
Danny Trejo (The man, the myth, the legend)
The Asylum
Eddie Izzard’s Alcatraz bit from Dressed to Kill
Lombard Street in San Fransisco
Log
- The Lure - October 17, 2018
- Extraterrestrial - July 30, 2017
- Invasion - July 16, 2017