Lured in by a psychotronic-sounding title, I sat down for this low-budget effort and immediately got pulled up short. Now, I'm not naive enough to expect filet mignon efforts on a potted meat budget, but I did expect to have a reasonably good time without too many rough edges and seams showing to distract me from the movie. Not so. The first clue that this movie was going to be a mess was the fact that it's list of executive producers was probably longer than the cast and crew COMBINED.
Really. I lost count after 60. The movie was produced by Mahal Brothers Productions, which apparently relies heavily on crowdfunding and isn't above using the bigger donors to fill out minor roles or as extras. So, you have professional actors like Michael Paré delivering the goods next to overweight crowd funders delivering lines with all the subtle nuance of particleboard. In any other venue, this talent disparity would be fine (high school or community theater production), but in a mainstream film I do expect a modicum of professionalism; there's a big difference between a professional actor who can't act vs. A non-actor who has been shoehorned in because they contributed a few grand to the film's budget. I'm a firm believer in the old maxim about lots of cooks and broth, so I can't help but wonder what other machinations these execs did to make the movie worse than it was. A zombie apocalypse of unspecified origins is the reason we have a group of soldiers going to secure and/or destroy a key bridge. That's after we get almost 30 minutes of scenes of people belching out exposition or being massacred by zombies, little of which has to do with the bridge. Once we get to the bridge, things get marginally better, with an unspecified monster underneath that begins dispatching the soldiers. For some reason, the zombies have gotten out of the cities and are stumbling around this rural landscape, so they're a threat as well. Add in a hostile group of survivors, John Birch types who wouldn't like authority figures like army personnel anyways, and you should have enough conflict to generate interest, right? Nuh uh. This movie somehow manages to be boring even with all these factors. I have to wonder if this movie was some sort of tax write off, or simply created to fill the world with product. It's utter lack of entertainment seems to point to this.
Really. I lost count after 60. The movie was produced by Mahal Brothers Productions, which apparently relies heavily on crowdfunding and isn't above using the bigger donors to fill out minor roles or as extras. So, you have professional actors like Michael Paré delivering the goods next to overweight crowd funders delivering lines with all the subtle nuance of particleboard. In any other venue, this talent disparity would be fine (high school or community theater production), but in a mainstream film I do expect a modicum of professionalism; there's a big difference between a professional actor who can't act vs. A non-actor who has been shoehorned in because they contributed a few grand to the film's budget. I'm a firm believer in the old maxim about lots of cooks and broth, so I can't help but wonder what other machinations these execs did to make the movie worse than it was. A zombie apocalypse of unspecified origins is the reason we have a group of soldiers going to secure and/or destroy a key bridge. That's after we get almost 30 minutes of scenes of people belching out exposition or being massacred by zombies, little of which has to do with the bridge. Once we get to the bridge, things get marginally better, with an unspecified monster underneath that begins dispatching the soldiers. For some reason, the zombies have gotten out of the cities and are stumbling around this rural landscape, so they're a threat as well. Add in a hostile group of survivors, John Birch types who wouldn't like authority figures like army personnel anyways, and you should have enough conflict to generate interest, right? Nuh uh. This movie somehow manages to be boring even with all these factors. I have to wonder if this movie was some sort of tax write off, or simply created to fill the world with product. It's utter lack of entertainment seems to point to this.