TITLE & REVIEW
This is set in the near future,
when Southeast Asia has become a hub for biotech research.
Well, it is conveniently close for China but it is south of the Brandt line,
with all the advantages that an impoverished country can provide to the greedy rich.
Unfortunately it all goes badly wrong,
and a city is quarantined after an outbreak of Fast Zombies.
Resident Evil 2
, anyone?
Dolph Lundgren ( Red Scorpion ) is hired to lead a team of mercenaries into the city and retrieve the daughter of the greedy CEO whose company caused the outbreak. His special skillset is that he led a Delta Force team in Mogadishu in 1993, at the time of the Black Hawk Down incident. Back then the actor was appearing in Universal Soldier , whereas now he is one of The Expendables . Just to put things in perspective.
Naturally, things go badly wrong. The team get wiped out, and the daughter is unwilling to come. Worse, time is of the essence because the military are about to incinerate the city.
Luckily, the zombies are only as fast as the plot demands. Our hero gets chained to a lamp-post, and still manages to defend himself against multiple opponents.
In another stroke of luck, there are some bipedal robots around. They look like a cheap version of the Centurions in BSG (2003) , but they can kill zombies and not get eaten. Best of all, they can push a car that is otherwise immobile - rather than just have to roll up the windows and shelter inside it until nightfall.
Laurence Fishbourne (
Event Horizon
) rules an outpost that has survived an apocalyptic catastrophe.
The world has frozen over, like in
The Day After Tomorrow
, and made the USA look like northern Ontario.
Fishburne and a couple of sidekicks go to another outpost to look for survivors. They find Julian Ritchings ( Supernatural ), but the place is overrun by cannibals. This is a vast improvement on the usual menace - the Fast Zombies cliche.
Back home there are other problems. Trigger-happy Bill Paxton ( Apollo 13 ) is stirring up trouble.
This is a zombie apocalyse film, set in Nevada.
A small town of survivors has banded together in the wilderness.
Unfortunately they have bigger things to worry about than the zombies,
which they refer to as Copperheads.
A woman who calls herself Apocalypta has decided to conquer the town.
She adopts the trappings of a voodoo priestess, and seems to have a way to control the zombies.
The Mayor gets together a gang of desperados to save the town. There are seven of them, as in the Magnificent Seven , all with specialised weapons. Only one of the men has melee weapons - Erik Estrada Junior, who dresses like a Latino ninja. There is also a woman who uses a sickle as her weapon. The rest use guns - and they use them a lot. They blaze through ammunition as if there was no tomorrow. The characters in The Walking Dead would not be amused. For some reason, one character wastes limited sniper rifle ammo taking out zombies that are either trapped or at close range, when he could just pick a rock off the ground instead.
What saves the film from utter mediocrity is its very dumbness. The zom-pocalypse western is something of a redundant sub-genre, but this breaks every act into a chapter like something Quentin Tarantino would do.
This movie starts by giving the twist away,
so the tension is lowered and the story can continue in a comedic tone.
A redneck woman (
Lauren Holly
) hunts people and feeds them to her zombies.
A family of white working class Americans go on a vacation to a Cabin in the Woods . They discover that Ms Holly is their next-door neighbour, and they see what she is up to. As stated, there is no suspense for the audience because we already know what she gets up to for her hobby.
New York City is nuked.
A group of neighbours survive, locked together in the basement of their apartment building.
Luckily, the building's janitor (Michael Biehn -
Aliens
) is a survivalist who has turned it into a bunker.
Milo Ventrigli ( Heroes ) and his sidekick (Michael Eklund - Wynona Earp ) slowly go crazy. They were not career criminals before they got locked in the basement, but the stress of confinement drives them beyond their breaking point. Biehn spends most of the film tied up, so the Final Girl must save the day.
This effort is well-shot, evoking a claustrophobic feel to the film. However, there is a major problem with the film. There are no decent people in this film, certainly nobody to root for. The Lord of the Flies storyline means they are all greedy, vicious caricatures.
Danny Dyer (
Straightheads
), Noel Clarke (
Centurion
) and a bunch of their mates go on a men-only weekend trip with
Christina Cole
as their bus-driver.
They are all hen-pecked by their women,
except for the homosexual one who is hen-pecked by his boyfriend.
As a result, they all want to get away from that kind of abuse.
Unfortunately the village they go to has been cursed by a witch,
and all the women have been turned into monsters and eaten all the men.
This film is played for laughs, and it does have a certain amount of originality - especially with regards to the nature of the monsters. Phase one is a simple Fast Zombie. Phase two involves metamorphosis into a more lycanthropic creature.
The lads so have one slim hope. Neil Maskell ( Utopia ) was delayed, and might turn up just in time to save them. Although we all know how that turned out in The Shining .
A title-card gives us the backstory.
The zombie apocalypse has begun.
Brian Cox (
Manhunter
) narrates the tale of his ancestor,
who lived through a previous zombie outbreak in the wild west.
The ancestor was a veteran of the US civil War. When he returned home he lost his family in the outbreak, and wandered the wilderness alone. Eventually he found a stranger with a quest. A mad Confederate General (Bill Moseley - ) has his men abduct people so that his Doctor (Stephen Mchattie - ) can experiment on them. The hope is of finding someone who is immune, so that they can create a cure. Since these villains have abducted the stranger's sister, our hero agrees to help rescue her.
The survivors seek refuge with a local witch-woman ( Dee Wallace ). Luckily, they discover the source of the outbreak of zombies. Also, somehow the hero manages to write a journal about all of this. Even scenes that he is not present in.
There is a fast zombie apocalypse.
A bus filled with survivors gets ambushed.
A woman gets bitten, but her baby is saved by two men.
Nine years later, the zombie apocalypse has turned into a new ice age. The baby has grown up to become a young girl with two fathers. The breadwinner (Matthew Fox - Lost ) runs his own radio station where he broadcasts in search of other survivors. The home-maker (Jeffrey Donovan - Blair Witch 2 ) spends all his time raising the girl.
Fox and Donovan are estranged. Fox spends his days alone with nobody for company except a dog. He has let himself go, with long hair and a beard – like a character in The Walking Dead . In contrast, Donovan keeps himself well-groomed
The young girl is the catalyst that brings the two old friends together again. Well, her and the return of the fast zombies. They have mutated and become blind, so they hunt by sound.
This is set in a zombie apocalypse.
A young woman drives across a desert,
supposedly somewhere in the USA but actually filmed in Morocco.
Before she can make it back to home base,
she accidentally crashes her jeep.
Night is closing in, and her colleagues will not risk coming to look for her until dawn.
She is trapped with a broken leg as a zombie stumbles around outside.
There are flashbacks of the woman's relationship with an art gallery owner, back in the pre-zompocalypse era. As they have their ups and downs, the impending outbreak barely gets any setup.
The climactic twist is actually quite impressive. Yes, this is a somewhat original zombie movie!
This is set on the island of Ibiza, a mediterranean paradise
that fills with boozy British tweenagers every summer.
Even though this is set in a world where zombies are a constant threat,
the teenagers assume that the government has taken sufficient precautions.
The cast are a group of unknowns, and their characters are the usual stereotypes. However, they are acted with vim and vigour - which breathes new life into old tropes. The result is quite watchable.
The film was written and directed by one man, but it is actually quite watchable. The end credits include some out-takes, but they are less watchable. It seems that the best shots really did end up in the movie.
Joel Edgerton (
Midnight Special
) is a redneck who is in a mixed-raced marriage.
Just like in Loving, but instead of facing racism in the segregation era
they have to cope with The Infected in a zombie apocalypse.
Trapped in a remote cabin in the woods , they are joined by another family (including Riley Keogh ). However, this merely increses the tension. We go from the suspense of the unknown to a deeper, more claustrophobic sense of paranoia.
This starts with a couple of people fleeing a zombie apocalypse in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Their car breaks down,
and they will have to walk thirty miles to the airstrip
if they want to get to safety.
Unfortunately a zombie makes short work of the man -
he wastes bullets at long range,
and does not aim for the head.
The Walking Dead
has ruined this genre for the audience,
because we know that all you need to stop a zombie
is to stab it in the brain.
The woman has to walk across the desert, with the zombie close behind her all the way. As the story progresses, the woman starts to get used to the zombie. From her perspective, he is not significantly worse than some of the men she has avoided dating. She gives him a nick-name, and even gets him to unknowingly pull her supplies for her.
There is a tacked-on third act, almost as if the film-makers needed to expand the running time. By this stage, the zombies have now changed from the slow-moving Romero type to the modern Fast Zombie type.
An American tweenager is hospitalised in South Africa.
Worse, the country is suddenly hit with a zombie apocalypse.
The Yank, a beautiful Afrikaans lady doctor and a couple of black orderlies must walk to safety.
This starts with an opening credits sequence that is so reminiscent of the 1970s that
Quentin Tarantino
must be dripping with envy.
The writer-director of this particular effort is
Brian Taylor
, an unfamiliar name easily lost among the world's many wannabe auteurs.
The story starts with a stereotypical upper-middle-class family in suburban USA. The mom ( Selma Blair ) and dad (Nicholas Cage - Wicker Man (2006) ) have two children. As befits a rich white family they have a Chinese servant woman who brings her daughter to work.
The adults are smitten with an unknown contagion that makes them act like violent teenagers. If this sounds familiar, it is because it was used as the plot of Buffy: S3 Band Candy . What makes this different is that the parents are actively murderous towards their own children. It is not a generic Fast Zombie situation, but rather one of very specific and individual rage.
We get a few scenes from the parents' perspectives, where we see the micro-transactions they are lumbered with every day from their teenagers. Then the story switches to the High School, where the teenagers are learning about planned obsolescence. This is the theme of the movie - the parents are afraid of being replaced by their own offspring. The women especially become family annihilators in the mould of Medea and La Lorona.
The parents arrive en masse at the school, and stage an all-out attack on the children. There are a couple of other impressive scenes of suspense and carnage while the characters discover they are in a social apocalypse.
One commentator on the television postulates the contagion is a form of biological warfare. This is reminiscent of The Screwfly Solution .
Cage does his usual going-off-the-rails act. It seems that the father was always a borderline psycho, and that it would have emerged even without the contagion. Blair has her own issues, but when they work together they are actually convincing as a couple.
The children get trapped in the basement, and chased around the house by their murderous parents. This becomes a grown-up version of Home Alone, but without the burglars. In this version of the story, the parents are not merely neglectful but down-right murderous.
The irony of the situation, as pointed out by one of the characters, is that single-parent families have twice the survival chances.
Apparently there is no age limit to the family annihilator rage. Cage's father (Lance Hendrickson - Terminator (1984) ) is due for dinner, and this becomes a family reunion.
This is set in a world where the zombie apocalypse is well underway.
They are Fast Zombies, infected with a fast-acting form of rabies.
An interrogator (Matt Smith - Dr Who ) and a scientist (John Bradley - Game of Thrones ) are based in a military bunker. Their boss ( Natalie Dormer ) is also Smith's love interest. Well, he needs someone to distract him from his girlfriend ( Agness Deyn ) who got infected and now has a cell in the basement.
Their mission is to find the very first person infected with the zombie plague, in the hope that finding the source will bring them closer to finding a cure. The biggest problem, other than the Fast Zombies, is the trigger-happy Colonel (Clive Standen - Vikings ) who is in charge of security.
A new zombie prisoner, The Professor (Stanley Tucci - The Core (2003) ), is captured and interrogated. He makes the team re-assess everything known about the zombies.
This movie features a mostly English cast, and was partly filmed at Shepperton Studios. However, for some reason it seems to be set in the USA.
The book that this is based on follows the plot of the Jane Austen novel quite well.
However, this adaptation is in name only.
The genre has been shifted from romantic comedy-drama to all-out action-adventure.
As a result, Mr Wickham is no longer a minor supporting role in a subplot
and is now a central character.
Darcy is not merely a local gentleman, he is a Colonel in the zombie-killing Militia.
Circa the year 1800, England is overrun by flesh-eating zombies. These are no normal zombies, they are the most unusual kind. The undead plague began in the colonies, so it may be a voodoo curse reminiscent of Zombie Flesh-Eaters . However, it is spread by bodily fluids, perhaps a reference to the Cholera epidemics from India in the 1830s. This spread-by-bite aspect makes the zombies more like the Romero type in Night of the Living Dead . Thirdly, in the post- 28 Days Later era most zombies are FAST zombies, and this film is no exception. Finally, the plague's leaders are SMART zombies ... the type four, and in this version they only turn rabid after they have eaten human brains. Yes, this is an action-adventure with fast, smart zombies and the rom-com elements are pushed into the B-Story.
Be warned, there is a post-credits sequence.
This starts with a couple of Missing posters and a voice-over narration,
reminiscent of the Missing Persons storyline in
Blair Witch Project
. The concept is that a trio of American tweenagers have gone missing
while doing TEFL (Teaching English As A Foreign Language)
at a Summer camp in northern Spain.
The main story starts two days earlier, when the tweenagers arrived at the camp. They bumped into a creepy local who has a hunting knife on his belt. However, this is all misdirection, a red herring – a visual equivalent of the Lewton Bus.
One of the dogs had a bad case of some form of rabies. Before long, the humans are turning into Fast Zombies. Strangely the zombie-itis comes and goes, so a victim can become one and then have the condition go into remission.
This starts as a satire on the US Military-Industrial complex.
George Bush is re-elected, starting wars against anyone who speaks Arabic
or French - including Canada.
Unfortunately, the US military runs out of cannon-fodder.
The answer is to reanimate the dead ones, like in
Universal Soldier
. Naturally, the zombified test subjects take over the lab.
A Special Forces unit is sent in, consisting of a ragged bunch of misfits.
However, they do not pay attention in the briefing.
The scientist clearly states that an EMP will knock out the zombies,
but does not state that it will kill them.
Also, they do not seem to understand that an EMP
will take out their non-hardened radio communications gear.
The lab is next door to a strip-club run by Robert Englund ( Nightmare on Elm Street ). The headliner Jenna Jameson gets bitten and infected. The good news is, the virus is gender-selective so she becomes a Type Four (Smart) zombie. The bad news is, the female zombies must feed on the flesh of their custmers, who then turn into the old-fashioned, feral zombies. The good news, there is a never-ending supply of customers because local men find zombie women strangely irresistable. The bad news is, Robert Englund has a limited amount of storage space in his basement to keep all the male zombies.
Jennifer Holland pops up as a trainee stripper in one of her first appearances.
Emily Blunt
and her real-life husband, John Krasinski (
) try to keep their family alive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Just like
Anne Heche
and her real-life husband in
Aftermath
. In this case, Krasinski is also the director -
and he does a masterful job in both roles.
The story starts on day 89, some time in the year 2020, when the family are scavenging for food in an uninhabited town. They are completely silent, communicating by sign language (with subtitles). Evidently the monsters are attracted by sound, like the zombies in The Walking Dead . And when one of the monsters finally makes its appearance, the result is both shocking and horrifying.
The story picks up again on day 472, when the family has settled down on a farm. They have adapted to living in complete silence, for example by using headphones whenever they need to listen. Everyone walks barefoot all the time, and the silence causes a palpable air of tension all the time as the audience is constantly waiting a noise to break the suspense.
The Great Escape rule of the least appropriate person comes into play. For example, the daughter is deaf and therefore cannot hear sounds that might give them away to the monsters. Worse, the mother is heavily pregnant - and even if she does not scream during childbirth, her newborn will have to start crying with its very first breath. And naturally, Murphy's law dictates that the worst possible thing always happens at the worst possible time.
The monsters represent an external threat, but they are in the background. The main conflict is internal. For example, the daughter blames herself for something bad that happened - reminiscent of the storyline in Rachel's Key. Likewise, the parents are dedicated to protecting their kids at all costs.
What really makes a monster movie is the monsters themselves, and this is no exception. They may be CGI, but they are used sparingly and to great effect. Much like the alien invaders in Signs , they are naked and rely on their body's natural appendages to attack their prey. However, these ones are actually a convincing threat. Despite being blind and naked, they are incredibly fast and strong. A newspaper clipping implies that the creatures' natural exoskeleton is virtually impervious to physical damage. That said, they need to expose their ears in order to hear things which leaves them vulnerable to a head-shot at close range.
This starts with a flashback to the world before the apocalypse.
Lee (John Krasinski -
) and his wife (
Emily Blunt
) took their kids to a baseball game.
A meteorite is seen passing overhead,
probably landing a dozen miles away ...
yet the town is quickly overrun by the alien invaders.
The main storyline starts up directly after the ending of the first film. Although the family have discovered the aliens' one weakness, and managed to weaponise a tool capable of exploiting this weakness, they only use it when the plot deems it dramatic.
Rather than re-fortify their existing home, Emily and the kids go looning for a new hideout. The good news is that the place they find is home to their old neighbour (Cillian Murphy - Batman Begins ). The bad news is that he has become a cynical misanthrope, and believes that most people are no longer worth saving. If this were true, the human species would be better off extinct.
The deaf girl decides to go out looking for other survivors, and Cillian goes out after her. They discover some bad people who survive by stealing from others, but also some good people led by a radio broadcaster (Djimon Houson - Guardians of the Galaxy ).
Although the story is split into two, one following the neighbour and the other the mother, they have been edited together so that both of them climax at the same time. Yes, both groups get cornered by an alien monster at the same time.
This is set in contemporary South Korea.
A group of assorted passengers gets on a high-speed intercity train
that is destined for the city of Busan.
A contaminated person comes aboard the train -
someone who carries a virus that turns people into fast zombies.
Before long, the passengers and crew are fighting for their lives.
What sets this apart from the usual Hollywood tropes is the Asian culture that this is set in. Characters are driven by a sense of honour and duty that would seem out of place in a movie set in the USA. Likewise the fact that most of the passengers mindlessly obey orders from an authority figure, no matter how selfish and cowardly that figure might be.
The Fast Zombie outbreak has taken over the entire Korean peninsula.
However, the rest of the world is apparently safe.
A bit like the situation in
28 Weeks Later
, when the outbreak was limited to Great Britain.
Anyway, this story is about a handful of Korean refugees in Hong Kong.
A gangster gives them a chance to earn a lot of money
by retrieving a cargo from the zombie-infested city of Busan.
Somehow, nothing is known about what is going on in Korea. At least in Doomsday (2008) the government used spy satellites to keep track of the dead zone, but here they just use coastguard ships to keep people clear of the peninsula. Beyond that, no apparent effort is made.
The refugees find the cargo easily enough. However, they are not the only uninfected people in Busan. There are scavengers, known as Wild Dogs. There is also a military unit that was abandoned by the government and has since gone rogue. The soldiers' favourite spare-time activity is betting on a Death Game, like in Land of the Dead but with Fast Zombies and multiple contestants.
One cannot blame the soldiers for going feral, since their government made no attempt to even resupply them by aircraft. Without communications, such as a cell-phone parachuted in, they have no way of knowing what has gone on in the outside world. For all they know, the whole planet could be a zom-pocalypse. In fact, if it had then this would explain the lack of aircraft.
One of the refugees teams up with a family of scavengers who escaped from military custody. They know a way into the unit's compound, and also want some revenge against the unit's commanding officer.
While the United Nations has done nothing, the survivors have few tricks for survival. The soldiers fire flares at their targets, thus making the victims the focus of the zombies attention. In turn the scavengers use a toy car to distract the zombies. All a step beyond the tactics shown in The Walking Dead .
The action scenes are OTT and CGI-intensive, with the Fast Zombies reminiscent of the hordes in World War Z . It has all been done before, so this has nothing new to offer.
A group of skiers stay in a cabin in the mountains of Norway.
They discover a hidden treasure of gold coins.
Then they start to get bumped off, one at a time, by Nazi zombies.
This is a tongue-in-cheek effort that does not take itself seriously.
This carries on directly from the final confrontation in the previous film.
The protagonist survives, but his troubles have not ended.
As per the rules of
And Then There Was One
, as the sole survivor he is arrested and blamed for all the deaths.
His only allies are a group of American internet nerds
who call themselves the Zombie Squad.
The nerds realise that they are not up against the Romero type of zombie that eats brains and spreads the infection by bite. While these Nazi zombies are both fast and relatively smart, they are basically the old-fashioned voodoo curse zombie. They have been given a mission, and will not rest until it is fulfilled. In the first movie, that mission was to protect the gold. However, it turns out they have another mission too. Hitler ordered the Colonel to annihilate a nearby village.
The villains re-arm at the local museum. Luckily for them it has a fully operational Tiger tank that is fueled and armed with live ammunition. Even better, the zombies include an expert tank crew.
To fight an army of Nazi zombies, the good guys have to raise their own army. Luckily there is a mass grave of Soviet POWs nearby, eager to get their revenge on the Nazi officer who killed them.
A group of mercenaries led by Ray Stevenson (
Punisher: War Zone
) and Michael Smiley (
The Aliens
) are hired to escort a scientist to an abandoned World War Two bunker.
Unfortunately the bunker is in the former Yugoslavia, hence the heavily-armed mercs.
When the men get to their destination, they eventually realise they have bigger problems than the local militias. The bunker was site of Nazi experiments to create an army of super-soldiers. When the mercenaries enter, the Nazi ghost-soldiers start to pick them off, one at a time. So, totally original idea for a film …
This is part of a sub-genre of horror film, the military supernatural survival film. Prime examples would be The Keep, The Bunker, Deathwatch ...
This is a sequel to a low-budget horror film.
Usually these things are made on the cheap in Eastern Europe.
This one is set in Eastern Europe, but made on the cheap in Scotland.
A young female Nazi-hunter tortures OAP Nazi Michael Pennington ( ) for personal vengeance. Then she discovers that he helped fund the expedition from the first film. In order to catch his boss, she goes to the bunker area.
The bunker is surrounded by an electro-magnetic field that is slowly expanding. The Nazi super-soldiers are unkillable anywhere in that field, which is now thirty miles across. Luckily she teams up with Richard Coyle ( Prince of Persia ) and some soldiers led by Daniel Caglione (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking barrels).
Parts of this are unoriginal, but for what it is (a sequel to a low-budget horror) it is watchable.
This is a prequel to the series.
In early 1945, a Russian Spetznaz unit is working behind the German lines in Yugoslavia.
They are looking for a secret bunker,
which contains some kind of secret weapons research.
Unfortunately the Germans have the advantage of numbers,
and use a Fast Zombie as a sniffer dog.
The Spetznaz leader is locked up in the bunker and used for experimentation. The Germans test their Fast Zombies to destruction by letting the Spetznaz kill them. The idea is to make stronger and stronger zombies.
Naturally, the Russian escapes and goes on a kill-crazy rampage.
A couple of American astronauts land on the moon.
One of them is an African American male model,
selected for a publicity stunt instead of actual science.
The yanks discover there is a city of Nazis on the dark side of the moon. This is like a Wakanda for white people! The major drawback seems to be that their science has not advanced much in seven decades. A modern cell-phone contains a thousand times more computing power than every computer on the moon combined.
The Nazi scientist turns the African-American into an albino. Unfortunately the black man is not happy about the change. It has deprived him of his identity and access to his culture.
The Nazis send an expedition back to Earth. Their top man is Major Klaus, and his girlfriend – a beautiful schoolteacher – stows away. The albino African-American is taken along as a guide.
Back on Earth, it becomes apparent we are in an alternate time-line. The POTUS is a Sarah Palin lookalike. Her campaign manager ( Peta Sergeant ) manages her office staff the way Hitler managed his Generals in Downfall. In an act of supreme political satire, POTUS Palin unknowingly uses propaganda speeches written by the Space Nazis.
Finally, in the Third Act the Nazi fleet invades Earth. Their battleships are shaped like zeppelins, and their tactics include dropping meteors This could cause an extinction level event if used for real. Luckily the US Military has a space warship of its own, the USS George W Bush. It is officially the Mars Explorer ship, but it has been weaponised with nuclear warheads. All the other countries (except for Finland) have militarised their own spaceships too.
This is a comedy, so it can get away with the heavy-handed use of archetypes. However, it is a messed-up movie that can get the audience to empathise with the Nazis. After all, the poor bastards just want to defend their homeland from a power-grab by the US military-industrial complex which has militarised space in order to secure their access to a new fuel supply.
In 2018 the Moon Nazis invaded Earth.
Unfortunately the Earthlings used nuclear weapons in self-defence.
By the year 2048 peace has broken out,
and the remaining survivors have evacuated to the moon-base.
There are only about 1180 humans left alive,
but they are joined by some refugees from Russia.
The bad news is that the moon-base has limited food supplies.
The protagonist, also the narrator, is the daughter of the heroes of the first film. She holds the moon-base together as well as the plot.
The Apple Corporation has become a religion, led by Tom Greene ( Charlie's Angels (2000) ). This leads on to a scene that parodies the famous advert from 1984, because it is only fair to state that Apple became what they portrayed IBM as becoming.
Wolfgang (Odo Kier - Blade (1997) ) is back. Well, his body is anyway. He is an alien shape-shifter with access to a technology that can preserve his life indefinitely. His species, the Vrils, has a secret colony in the centre of the hollow Earth. The plot, as well as the title, are taken from a work by an obscure Victorian Sci-Fi writer named Bulwer-Lytton.
The protagonist sets out to visit the centre of the Earth. She has the Russian pilot, and a few Apple worshippers tag along. They also recruit one of the stormtroopers, who ditches his armour and puts on his lucky red shirt instead.
The Vril use velociraptors as guard-dogs and triceratops to pull their chariots. This leads on to some amazing CGI dinosaur scenes. Finally, the third act features Adolf Hitler riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex!
Rayne (
Natassia Malthe
) is a Vampiress with a big pair of swords (and cleavage to match).
During World War 2, in occupied Europe,
she joins a Resistance gang and tries to kill an SS Comandant (Michael Pare -
Streets of Fire
).
The SS Comandant gets infected and becomes a vamp himself. He has a new plan - to make Hitler a super-Vampire. Can Rayne save the world?
This was directed by Uwe Boll , derided as the worst director in the world. However, considering how low the budget must have been this is actually almost watchable. It was filmed in Croatia to keep costs down, but the language is English to enable wider distribution.
This is set in 1918, in the final days of World War One.
British Intelligence have discovered that the Germans have a secret base,
Trench Eleven, in the Argonne forest.
When the Americans made a breakthrough, the Germans fled.
Now the abandoned base, filled with secret technology, is lying empty.
The Allies send a team out to investigate.
All this exposition is explained at length during an official briefing,
then duplicated in a concise summary during a campfire scene.
A decent writer would have stuck with the second scene
and dispensed with the first,
but that would have trimmed too much off the running time.
Two British officers are in charge, but because the Argonne is in the American-occupied region the infantry unit charged with accompanying them are Americans. While the Brits are stereotypical Englishmen who even bring a silver teapot with them, the Yanks are a gang of ill-disciplined cowboys. The team also includes an expert tunneler, the real hero of the piece, who happens to be Canadian. Yes, not a snob or a cowboy, just a regular Canadian. Small wonder that this was made in Canada.
The Allies enter the bunker, ignoring all warning signs that something is badly wrong. The bunker is filled with experiments that went badly wrong, which means there is a serious risk of a Fast Zombie outbreak. To complicate things, the Germans send in a team of their own.
In 1944, a couple of New Zealand SAS saboteurs land in the Channel Islands just prior to D-Day.
They discover a post-
Raiders of the Lost Ark
scene with lots of dead Nazis and a woman who looks like the hero's dead wife.
The evil seems to have come from a witch's grimoire
- not unlike the Book of the Dead plot device in
Evil Dead
.
This film is a mediocre attempt at suspense. The best thing that can be said about it is that one of the protagonists looks like Liam McIntyre ( Spartacus: Blood and Sand ).
This is a Found Footage effort about a small group of soldiers.
Its unique selling point is that the soldiers are Russian conscripts in World War Two!
The film starts shakily enough. One might be able to rationalise away the inadequacies because it is meant to have been shot on a hand-held cine camera on the Russian front in the 1940s. However, it just seems to be a poorly-made film.
The conscripts blunder into a farmhouse where a Nazi scientist has created some half-human monsters. Unfortunately the scientist is insane. Worse, his monsters have escaped and killed almost everyone. Now the conscripts get picked off, one at a time.
This starts in World War Two,
in Northern France (although it was shot in Bulgaria).
A unit of US Army soldiers marches across the countryside,
wiping out anyone who gets in their way.
The unit includes a few familiar faces - Tappert (Kyle Gallner -
Veronica Mars
), Butchie (Alan Ritchson -
) and Kirk (Theo Rossi -
Vendetta
) are all talented actors,
although best known for their television work.
The American soldiers are merciless, murdering prisoners of war like Dr. Engel (Billy Zane - Dead Calm ). Even though the storyline includes German war crimes, all this does is it just puts two sets of villains against each other. Nobody is shown as chivalric or heroic, there are just degrees of villainy.
The American team gets stationed in an empty chateau, which they have to hold because it is a strategic position. Unfortunately, they have more than Germans to worry about. The place appears to be haunted by the family who used to live there. This leaves the Americans in a tough position.
To tie it all up, the writer-director gives us a final twist. This explains all the anachronisms, and papers over all the plot holes that have popped up. In other words, nothing in the story actually has to make sense.
This starts as a low-budget zombie movie set in a disused military facility.
It is revealed to be a movie-within-a-movie,
but the film crew quickily find themselves beset by real zombies.
This is shot as Found Footage,
although something about it does not seem to make sense.
However, everything is made clear in a mid-point twist. We get a flashback to the film director getting commissioned to make his zombie film. His reputation for being cheap, fast and mediocre has led him to be selected to make the showcase show for a new TV station, the Zombie Channel. They want a live broadcast without breaks ...
Of course, everything goes wrong. The lead actress has to be replaced with the Director's wife, who took up martial arts as a hobby after her acting career ended because she got carried away with method acting.
This starts the day before D-Day in June 1944.
The US 101st Parachute Infantry Division, AKA the Screaming Eagles,
sets off to be dropped behind enemy lines in occupied France.
We get introduced to the main characters
while they are on the plane to their destination.
One is a war photographer (Iain De Caestecker -
Agents of SHIELD
). The main protagonist, a young Private, is a token black guy.
The commanding officer (Bokeem Woodbine - Blade: The Series ) encourages his men to be just as nasty as the other side because the ends justify the means. This is problematic on a number of levels. In many ways the US military WAS (and still is) rather nasty to outsiders. During the Second World War they imprisoned American citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps, and the 101st infantry was a segregated whites-only unit. The unhistorical casting of a black man in a senior role in that unit is misleading, and glosses over the real-life nastiness. It is an insult to the Civil Rights movement, who struggled for decades to get equality.
The landing is a complete foul-up, with the Screaming Eagles dropped into a forest instead of open fields. A handful of paratroopers survive, and head off to accomplish their mission. They meet a tweenage French girl who agrees to help them. Luckily Token Black Guy is bilingual in French, which could have made a legitimate reason to include him on the mission. After all, in Force 10 from Navarone they had Carl Weathers ( Predator ) stow away with a US Rangers team because he was escaping the military Police. Having the TBG with unique skills as a translator is actually a much more plausible concept.
The French village is run by a cliched Nazi officer (Pilou Asbaek - Game Of Thrones ). He is trilingufluent in French and English, which is convenient because it makes the plot move along quickly. The so-called good guys decide to torture him for information. TBG does not agree with this, but his conscience and humanity are treated as weaknesses to be overcome.
As the story progresses, TBG single-handedly infiltrates the secret Nazi base. They have been conducting experiments on prisoners in the hope of producing super-soldiers. The Thousand-Year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers, we are told. Test subjects from unsuccessful experiments are basically Fast Zombies.
In the final battle we discover that the French tweenage girl is a better fighter than the battle-hardened veterans of the US infantry. The problem is that when the normal things are blatantly fake, the audience lose their suspension of disbelief.
During the Second World War,
a band of Allied Special Forces operatives infiltrate Nazi-occupied Europe.
One of the Brits wears a Para's red beret with an SAS winged dagger.
The villains are the usual cliched Nazis whose tactics consist of lining up to be shot.
In 1953, Ilsa has spent the years since the fall of the Third Reich in new employment.
She runs Gulag 14, a Soviet work camp.
Her speciality is killing rebellious inmates, and feeding them to her pet tiger ...
and if you are really lucky, she will do it in that order!
Her methods are not limited to torture. She ensures the guards get enough sex (she takes them two at a time) while she has ...
Can her Commissar brainwash a political prisoner into becoming a model Communist? Or will he lead a violent rebellion against the guards?
The second half of the story takes place half a century later, in Montreal of all places. Ilsa is involved in a local organised crime syndicate. However, the Russians want revenge on her.
