TITLE & REVIEW
A criminology Professor takes a group of students to a remote location,
where they get picked off one at a time.
If this sounds familiar it was the plot to a couple of whodunit films
- D-Tox and Mindhunters.
But this time the Professor (Michael Shanks -
Stargate SG-1
) is a CSI expert, and his students include Brendan Fehr (
Roswell
) and
Katharine Isabelle
.
This is not a slasher film with a serial killer. Instead, the killers are fast zombies left over from unethical experiments on convicts. The victims are inexperienced students, so they can be excused for not acting like professionals, although this does take things borderline close to the clichés of the Dead teenager movie.
This is set in Serbia, of all places.
The protagonists are US Government Agents named after famous film directors (Milius, etc).
The team leader is Ken Foree (
Dawn of the Dead
). They must transport a violent criminal to Budapest airport,
where they will fly him to secure custody.
Naturally, a zombie apocalypse slows them down.
In 1590 a regiment of Conquistadors marched off in search of El Dorado,
and were never seen again.
It turns out that they found some gold that had been cursed by an Aztec priest (like in
Pirates of the Carribean
), and then got butchered by skeleton warriors (
Mummy 2: The Scorpion King
).
We move forward to the modern day. How long will the cliched group of tweenagers last? They may be enthusistic at off-road racing, but they are led by an archaeology professor who believes the legends.
The scenery is amazing, but the story quickly gets taken over by the TV-budget CGI SPFX.
Teenage tearaway Dave Franco (
Warm Bodies
) gets sent to Boot Camp in Canada.
The commandant is Mark Pellegrino (
Supernatural, Lost, Being Human USA
), who has actually changed his appearance
by getting a side-parting and a toothbrush moustache.
The staff eat poisoned meat, and turn into cannibalistic monsters. The inmates (including Elizabeth Harnois - playing a teenager despite having hit thirty) have to fight for their lives.
The movie ran out of funds half-way through. As a result, a couple of characters are mysteriously off-screen for most of the film, and there is no third act. Seriously, there is no denouement or climax!
This starts with some beautiful shots of the rural countryside
of the Lake District in the north of England.
Then we meet the protagonists, a mismatched married couple.
She is a wiry little redhead who works out in a boxing gymn.
He is a big bald flabby skinhead who goes shopping in a supermarket.
They drive to the Lake District to spend some time together, without the hassles of big-city life.
Unfortunately, the characters are mainstream folks who exhibit typical genre blindness. They ignore suspicious signs, like an abandoned car on the roadside (smeared with blood, if they had cared to look). Also, there is no sign of life anywhere around the holiday home they rented.
It turns out that there is one or more fast Zombies on the loose. When these fellows start to run, they go at full pelt and they keep going.
This starts as a typical teenage drama - although this one is set in Dublin, and stars
Samantha Mumba
. The main boy dies, and his mother does not bother doing First Aid on him - she does voodoo!
The rules of zombie-ism are a bit twisted. A bite turns the victim into a fast zombie, but there is a magical voodoo cure. However, even after the good guys discover there is a cure they still feed most of their zombie classmates into the woodchipper!
A small band of survivors face a zombie apocalypse.
Familiar faces include Chris Pine (
Star Trek
) and Christopher Meloni (
Man of Steel
).
This is a low-budget film from the early 1970s.
The director was
Bob Clark
- this is closer in tone to Porky's than to the original
Black Christmas
.
A theatre company of twenty-somethings in brightly-coloured clothing go to an island with a large cemetary. The company's director wants to act out a satanic ritual with a genuine corpse.
About half-way through the film, the corpses come back to life. The kids board themselves up in an abandoned house, like in Night of the Living Dead .
This is a Troma production, with a tiny role filled by Billy-Bob Thornton (
Armageddon
). It concerns a group of Biker babes and blind orphans in a desert town.
Rasimus Hardiker (
Your Highness
) and his brother are a pair of mockney geezers on the make.
Unfortunately, some workmen accidentally unleash a horde of zombies
that were sealed in a crypt after the Great Plague of 1665.
The good news is, they are slow zombies - with the walking speed of the average Old Age Pensioner. Unfortunately, our heroes want to save their grandma and her friends who are in a nearby nursing home filled with retired Eastenders bit-players.
In the wild west, a bounty hunter searches for a Native American warrior.
Nearby, some prospectors uncover a strange rock.
They take it back to the town, where it turns everyone into a zombie.
This starts as a typical High School story.
Unfortunately, on Prom night there is a zombie apocalypse.
The main twist is that the zombies are entranced by Heavy Metal music, which the band use like snake-charmers.
Two men and a woman are trapped together in a house in Spain.
Outside is a zombie apocalypse.
Our protagonists have military-grade assault rifles, although anyone who has seen
The Walking Dead
will know that they are of limited use.
This is not an action thriller, it is more of a survival drama - like Blair Witch Project . Unfortunately, this effort suffers in the comparison. The characters have their flaws, but one cannot really care for any of them.
A new pharmaceutical product turns people who use it into Fast Zombies.
Worse than merely being fast, they suddenly become expert free-runners.
Yes, the English film-makers seem to have taken this idea from
Battle of the Bone
!
Hulking mercenary Craig Fairbrass has to hunt down the cure, the only test subject known to be immune to the drug - Myanna Buring . She has teamed up with her estranged ex-husband (Danny Dyer - ), a disgraced ex-cop who knows how to handle himself. Along with some dodgy types (including Jamie Murray ) they try to survive the Zombie free-runner apocalypse.
This is an homage to 1980s action films from
Neil Marshall
, the brains behind
Dog Soldiers
. The intro (straight out of
Escape from New York
) lets us know that Fast Zombies took over Scotland,
and were contained by a high-tech Hadrian's Wall.
Police Chief Bob Hoskins ( Who Framed Roger Rabbit ) and Prime Minister Alexander Siddig ( Star Trek: DS9 ) send Rhona Mitra north to rescue Malcolm McDowell ( Clockwork Orange ) and get the cure. Her team include Adrian Lester ( Robin Hood ) and Sean Pertwee ( Event Horizon ). The result is some full-throttle car chases and great action scenes with cannibalistic punks.
This is a Zombie Apocalypse film, in Spanish with subtitles.
A couple of survivors are hired to collect specimens
for a scientist who still hopes for a cure.
They run into a Nazi militia.
This was produced by Uwe Boll , but compared to his bigger-budgeted, poorly-produced American efforts this is quite watchable.
This is a found footage movie,
but its light-hearted tone makes it more of a mockumentary.
Basically, there has been a zombie outbreak caused by a dodgy ingredient in a new brand of frozen food.
The title is a reference to a Live Action Role-Play game played by the protagonists,
as group of older-looking students at college in the USA.
Predictably (and eventually, after a very slow build-up)
the campus and town are overrun by real zombies - fast ones, that is,
infected by a virus spread in a chemical deployed to counteract an oil spill.
The characters are a predictable mish-mash of archetypes - the gamer who is meta about the zombie apocalypse cliches, the sports jock and the counter-culture gamer girl. There is even a cut-price Jack Black! But the low budget seems to save it - there are no recognisable stars with the baggage of previous roles, merely some relatively underwritten characters.
This is a three-part UK TV drama,
but it works very well considering its limitations.
If it had been made for cinematic release,
it would not have had the same success.
Part One is set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. It was ended when scientists discovered a cure for zombification. Former zombies, now known as PDS sufferers, are re-integrated into society. The only one to look after them is a village nurse who looks too young to have a son in his 20s. The local Militia, the HVF (Human Volunteer Force), is still active in the village - killing suspected zombies.
Part Two: The protagonist bumps into a fellow PDS sufferer, a girl he used to hunt with. They go to the funfair together.
The HVF go out hunting in the woods. Yes, there are still rabid rotters on the loose. Will the Militia hand them in for the reward, or kill them in cold blood?
Part Three: The Protagonist decides to reveal what happened to the missing girl. Some folks show an incredible level of denial. Others show intolerance that is all too human.
Convicted bodysnatcher Dominic Monahan (
Lost
) is on Death Row.
He makes his confession to a monk (Ron Perlman -
Hellboy, Pacific Rim
).
This is like a fantasy version of Burke and Hare , where as well as dealing in actual corpses they have to contend with zombies.
This is an Australian horror film reminiscent of suspenseful masterpieces like
Wolf Creek
or
Long Weekend
. Unfortunately, it suffers quite badly in the comparison.
Six tweenagers go for a camping trip at a remote site. They cram themselves and their gear into a single jeep, obviously knowing or caring little about safety procedures. This would have been a good setup for a basic survival story, but that would have required writing some characters that were believable and that we actually cared about. Instead, typical of the writer-director wankfest that is the modern Indie horror scene, the writer-director took the OTT supernatural violence route.
The site is cursed, and one of the tweenagers becomes a fast zombie. She starts to bump off the others, because she is controlled by an evil cave that has rapist tentacles straight out of Evil Dead .
Grant Bowler (
Defiance
) and
Evalena Marie
are service employees in a run-down casino in Reno, Nevada.
They are locked in a storeroom together
when a nearby nuclear explosion turns the population into Fast Zombies.
They have to secure the building, and wait for rescue.
Lance Reddick ( Fringe ) is leader of a military unit that comes to the city. But can he and his men be trusted? After all, in a post-apocalyptic world the greatest danger comes from other survivors.
Cast aside, this is a generic modern zombie movie. The zombies themselves only represent exactly as much danger to the protagonists as is demanded by the script. The result is an uneven tone to the film.
This is an anthology of five short films,
presented as being on a website named ScaryOrDie.Com ...
Several actors play different roles in different films,
which may be confusing for people who tune in halfway through.
This is a ramped-up version of
American Psycho 2
, with a protagonist who looks like the title character from
Don't Trust the Bitch In Apartment 23!
Basically, the bitchy/sexy killer is a college student who works her way through the campus. The plot takes an even bigger turn when the medical students start bringing the murder victims back as zombies!
A TV signal sends people into a homicidal rage,
not unlike the apocalypse scenario in TV show
Dollhouse.
The infected people start to suffer hallucinations.
This leads to sporadic bursts of brutal violence.
This story is told in three episodes, each centring around a different character.
Five idiots and a hot stripper go off on a stag weekend.
Instead of playing old-fashioned laser tag or paintball
they get the newest version ... with stun-guns and zombies!
There are some nice references to The Prisoner , including a Dwarfish butler.
A Timothy McVeigh-style US patriot bombs a Government building.
Unfortunately, the building houses their secret germ warfare lab.
Their worst virus is unleashed, turning the survivors into fast zombies.
Jason London ( Mallrats ) tries to lead the survivors to safety. Unfortunately they tend to get split off into smaller groups, then picked off one at a time.
Police Chief C Thomas Howell ( Peter Benchley's Amazon ) tries to contain the situation. Federal Agent Judd Nelson (Breakfast Club) tries to arrange a cover-up.
This is a found footage effort, starting three months after the zombie outbreak.
The braindead monsters have taken over the world by outsmarting the humans.
One family leave their house's curtains open,
so their bright lights will attract any zombie within line of sight.
Daddy hears a noise, and wanders off into the darkness without a weapon.
Mummy leaves all the doors open,
meaning the zombies can wander all over the house with nothing to stop them.
Worse, with the doors half-open nobody knows which ones the zombies will appear through!
And then she tries to hide in the darkness while waving a bright torchlight around.
People like that are too stupid to live!
The main story concerns a video-journalist documenting a TA (military reservist) unit. Their fortified camp is slowly overrun by Romero Zombies (not FAST ones, the usual slow and lumbering ones). The military blaze away on full auto, wasting lots of ammo and forgetting about headshots. A handful escape, and try to get to safety.
The military is unpopular with civilians, presumably due to a policy to stem the zombie plague by killing all infected before they turn. In contrast, the civilian survivors seem to be bandits.
As well as the main officer and the cameraman there is a blonde civilian woman and a couple of redshirts - a female soldier and a token black guy. Who will get bumped off first?
Suburban house-husband Brad Pitt (
Fight Club
) has to save his wife and daughters from Fast Zombies.
But as the Zombie Apocalypse develops,
we discover he is a UN Special investigator.
Once conscripted, he is sent around the world to find a cure.
He visits exotic locations like South Korea, Israel ... and Wales.
The story depends on experts being incapable of doing their jobs properly. The Israeli Defence Force can no longer maintain a secure perimeter, while the World Health Organisation cannot prevent a disease outbreak in their top-level containment facility.
This is a big-budget zombie movie - something of a contradiction in terms, really. It even uses the term zombie in dialogue, something that never happened in the George A Romero films. It is based on a novel, bt the original writer has apparently disowned it because he wanted Romero-type slow zombies instead of Fast ones.
A handful of Dutch citizens get themselves arrested and locked in the police cells.
This turns out to be a good thing, because the city is hit by meteors.
When they get out they discover that
everyone above ground has been turned into zombies with green blood.
The main twist is that unlike in America there are no gun stores, so they arm up with sporting equipment instead!
This is a low-budget British movie about a burlesque freakshow.
They attend an Internet TV studio
run by a family of weirdos who keep a huge harem of scantily-clad bimbos.
The father is experimenting on a serum to create Fast Zombies.
He thinks this will win him the Nobel prize for Medicine,
although this must be taken as a further sign of his insanity.
And predictably, the harem girls all get infected and go on a rampage.
This is a
George A. Romero
zombie movie for the post-
Blair Witch Project
era. As usual, the living dead have taken over the world -
but this time it is documented by a group of camcorder-wielding media students.
The students go on a road trip in a camper van. They bump into some interesting folks, including a deaf Amish man who does not use a phone or a car but has a big stash of dynamite!
This is not original or big-budget - but it is a nice contrast with all the fast zombie movies coming out these days. Unfortunately the story itself is too cliched for the modern audience. The attempt at irony in the film's climax is far too contrived to be taken seriously.
This is the newest in
George A Romero
's zombie series, a crossover from
Diary of the Dead
. It is surprising that a big-name horror director is working with the kind of budget
that one would associate with the terrible made-for-TV efforts from the SyFy channel.
But his long years of expertise in the independent film-making sector
mean that he delivers a quality effort, whatever its drawbacks.
The SPFX are hi-tech compared to the 1960s stuff he started with,
with CGI exploding heads becoming almost the norm,
but he uses the now cheap technology to good effect.
Our heroes are a military team who have gone AWOL and decided to prey on the living while running from the dead. They end up getting involved with some canadian actors with terrible Oirish Accents supposedly playing hillbillies living on Plum Island, Delaware.
Oirishman Kenneth Walsh ( Twin Peaks ) has a feud with a more powerful Oirish clan, and gets exiled from the island. Can he get back to see his daughter (played by an actress who looks like Maggie Siff from Sons of Anarchy)?
This is a low-budget US remake of a Spanish film called
[Rec]
. It is a Found Footage effort, with television actors.
But it is not a bad film, even if it does come across as
Blair Witch Project
with zombies.
A TV journalist ( Jennifer Carpenter ) and her cameraman are covering the night shift of the local fire department. The fire-fighters get called out to an old apartment building, so the camera crew tag along. Then the CDC turns up and quarantines the building and everyone in it.
It turns out that a super-virulent strain of rabies is turning the inhabitants into Fast Zombies. The survivors get picked off one at a time, though the Found Footage format replaces old cliches with new ones. Lots of running around in the dark, the infamous Heather Gallagher scene and so on.
This is a sequel to the low-budget US remake of a Spanish film called
[Rec]
. It was written and directed by a single person
(always the mark of an amateurish effort),
and that person was not one of the original storytellers.
The previous film was found footage, while this has the more regular format.
The exception is some extraneous shots through a military night-sight,
which are neither Point-of-View shots or Found Footage.
Our heroines are a couple of stewardesses who board a late-night flight out of Los Angeles. One of the passengers watches a live emergency broadcast online, obviously a reference to the previous film.
There are a few potential sources of infection. One man is bitten by a supposedly tame hamster, while another is horribly ill with what might just be a bad case of food poisoning. We get a bit of suspense, but the outbreak is inevitable.
The crew manage to land at a nearby effort, but the survivors discover that they have been quarantined. Now, as well as fast zombies, there is a bit of a conspiracy to worry about. This gives us slightly more background on the Doomsday Cult that is apparently behind the virus.
As with the others in the series,
this is shot in Spanish with English subtitles.
A group of thirty-somethings attend a wedding. Unfortunately it is overrun by Fast Zombies. The survivors keep moving in the hope of finding safety, but they just get picked off one at a time.
This introduces a fourth kind of Zombie.
Previously we had Voodoo, Romero, Fast -
and now we have Smart as well.
Our hero wakes up dead, and his day gets worse from there. He discovers he was murdered and then reanimated as a walking corpse. Luckily, one of the other zombies has also retained his mental faculties so they can actually have a conversation together. Unfortunately, they then run into the black Bruce Willis!
The zombies decide to go on a road trip so the hero can propose to his girlfriend. However, a US Government clean-up crew is on their tail.
This is an adaptation of the novel She Who Brings Gifts.
Due to colour-blind casting, the black child and the white teacher have swapped races.
To some people this is a big issue, but it is one of pragmatism.
Firstly, the main role required the best child actor available.
Secondly, the nearest Black equivalent to Gemma Arterton would be Naomie Harris,
but she does not really have the star power.
Other white alternatives, the American equivalent (Scarlet Johannson)
or the (Slightly) older English version (Kate Winslet), would make money the big issue.
The entire budget was only 4 mil, and an A-lister would not take a phone call for that much.
Melanie is a young girl in a boarding school that is run more like a prison, guarded by British Army Sergeant Parker (Paddy Considine - Dead Man's Shoes ) and run by Doctor Caldwell ( Glenn Close ). The girl is a teacher's pet towards her teacher ( Gemma Arterton ), but she and her fellow inmates are guarded at all times.
The base is overrun by Fast Zombies, because a fungus transmitted through bodily fluids has been spreading for the last decade or so. A small group of survivors (the child and the big-name actors) flee the Fast Zombies, a scenario reminiscent of the last big British zombie movie - 28 Weeks Later . They have sound suppressors for their rifles, like in The Walking Dead , although knives are useless against the Fast Zombies.
Our heroes try to find the next sanctuary. They take the direct route - on foot through London! There, they stumble across the next stages in the zombies' evolution. One is the sporing process of the fungus itself. The other is a group of feral children, straight out of Lord of the Flies. Perhaps the Smart Zombies are the next step of humanity's evolution - a human-fungus symbiote that will replace humans as the dominant species, like the vampires in I Am Legend .
All in all this is an above-average effort. It is well-written (based on a novel) and has a great cast. However, instead of being a genre-changer (as the original Joe Straczynski script for World War Z is rumoured to have been) it merely feels slightly derivative.
This is narrated by our protagonist, a zombie known as R.
He wanders the streets after a zombie apocalypse,
and meets a human survivor named Julie.
Yes, this is basically a Romeo and Juliet story with a twist.
That is why they released it on Valentine's Week and not at Halloween!
Not only are human brains tasty and nutritious, but when a zombie eats them he absorbs the victim's memories. The zombies lumber along, but when food is close they can move very fast. This makes them more like The Infected (AKA Fast Zombies). And if they are infected, there may be a cure ...
Rombie and Julie encounter a few obstacles. She already has a BF - the annoying pretty-boy from Scrubs: Med School. Plus, she also has a psycho dad - the leader of the human resistance (John Malkovich - Con Air). Well, it is nice to see Cyrus the Virus as the potential SAVIOR of mankind!
Zombies that deteriorate too far become fast-moving CGI skeletons nicknamed Bonies. They are like the Sub-Suckers in Vampire Apocalypse film Daybreakers , which had its own share of problems. This is convenient, because it allows the zombies and humans the chance to bond by teaming up against a mutual enemy.
Eli the Walker (Denzil Washington -
Virtuosity
) is making his way on foot across a post-Apocalyptic USA.
It has been thirty years since The War.
Even though there is enough gasoline for villains to get around,
food and water are in short supply.
Even the human flesh is tainted with an epidemic of BSE,
instead of just the brains and spinal cords of a few unfortunate individuals.
Eli's mission is to take the King James Version across the USA without showing it to anyone. After thirty years he is still at it, while most people could have got there in about three. That said, he reads more of it every day.
By strange coincidence, the town that Eli wanders into is run by Gary Oldman ( Lost In Space ), who wants a copy of the Bible for himself. It seems that all the Bibles in the USA were destroyed by the survivors, who blamed it for the war. There must be some truth in the accusation, since the KJV is the most widely printed book in the English language!
The stranger wanders into town, befriends a gorgeous young female who has family links to the local leader ... Yes, a bit like the storyline to Avatar . The truth is, this whole thing is quite generic. The fight scenes are impressive, but get more and more overblown as the villains throw ever more firepower at the apparently unkillable action hero.
The film's theme is Faith. But due to the nature of the McGuffin, this is all a bit blatant. Nothing like the subtlety of Shawshank Redemption , for example. Given the fact that the survivors blamed the Bible enough to deliberately abolish it, and the vast amount of bloodshed it has caused during Eli's walk ... was it really worth it? Especially in a world where almost everyone is illiterate!
Mila Kunis gets to do more than most girls in action movies do - for example, this would pass the Bechtel test. Ray Stevenson ( Rome ) and Jennifer Beals round out the excellent cast as Oldman's henchman and blind moll respectively, while Michael Gough ( Harry Potter ) and Frances De La Tour have cameos as OAP survivalists.
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 global story, using an international cast and worldwide locations.
The result is a zombie apocalypse without the zombies.
Gwyneth Paltrow flies home from Hong Kong to hubby Matt Damon ( Dogma ). But she brings bat flu with her, and before long people are dropping like flies.
Laurence Fishburne ( Event Horizon, Predators ) and Kate Winslett are the CDC boss and field agent respectively. International doctor Maria de Medeiros is in China, trying to find the original source.
Pentagon goons Bryan Cranston (Malcolm in the Middle) and Enrico Corleoni ( Veronica Mars ) take over the CDC. Conspiracy journalist Jude Law ( A.I. ) blogs about a potential cure.
Shawn Ashmore (
Earthsea
), Dominic Monaghan (
Lost
) and a token black guy wander a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
They even have a couple of girls (
Ashley Bell, Shannon Sossymon
) for company.
However, this is more like
The Road
than
The Walking Dead
- there are cannibals, but no actual zombies.
Our heroes get ambushed by the cannibals. They dig in to make a last stand.
Bill Mason (Dougray Scott -
Mission Impossible 2
) is an expert in Triffids - flesh-eating plants.
This is useful when they replace humans as the dominant species.
The Greater London Area gets depopulated, except for blind people. Sighted people are rounded up and handcuffed to the blind people, so as to make more effective foraging teams. But the Triffids are on the march, and before long they will rule the streets. They may lumber slowly, like zombies, but they also have vicious tentacles and they aim for their victim's eyes. Naturally, nobody thinks of blocking natural choke points like bridges so as to limit the Triffids' progress through the city.
Bill and his partner ( Joely Richardson ) try to survive. They get conscripted by Eddie Izzard ( Mystery Men ) and Jason Priestley ( Jeremiah ).
Part 2:
Joely Richardson now works for Eddie Izzard, making a public service broadcast on the radio summoning survivors to London. She eventually becomes cynical about this.
Mason and Priestly hide out in a sanctuary run by Mother Superior ( Vanessa Redgrave ). Is it too good to be true?
They want to get to Mason's father (Brian Cox - Troy ). He is the greatest living authority on Triffids, and has been working on a cure ever since the Apocalypse started.
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.
Daisy (
Saoirse Ronan
) is a teenage American girl who goes to stay with her cousins
Eddie and Isaac (Tom Holland -
Spider-Man: Homecoming
) in England.
Strangely, when she lands she finds herself in 1970s Northern Ireland -
or a close facsimile of it.
There are armed troops everywhere, and everyone is on edge.
It seems that nuclear war is about to start.
Once has she bonded with her cousins, then the Doomsday happens,
and they are left fending for themselves in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland.
This is based on a Young Adult novel, though some of the issues it deals with are quite grown-up. The focus is on the characters, with no real background on the political situation. Basically, a nuclear device is detonated in London, and the country is placed under martial law. But the kids have more to worry about than fallout. A terrorist movement was responsible for the blast, and now takes up arms against the military and whatever infrastructure is left. The politics of these terrorists is never explained - they are seen as murderers and rapists, with no visible motivation beyond that.
Predictably, Ronan carries the film. She excels in what is her first real grown-up role. She gets a love interest, for example. The supporting cast are all good, but the real problem appears to be the story. This territory has been covered before, and as such the film seems quite unoriginal.
Clone warrior Don Wilson hides out in a post-apocalyptic city.
He has flashbacks to the last battle, where he and his colleague (Mykelita Williamson -
Total Recall 2012
) and commanding officer Keith David (
The Thing
) took on an army of black-leather-clad cyborgs.
The idea of firing from cover never occurs to them -
they display a complete ignorance of military tactics,
and instead charge headlong into enemy fire.
Wilson is joined by Resistance fighter Katee Sackoff .
Martin (Cillian Murphy -
Batman Begins
) and Kate (
Thandie Newton
) go to stay on a deserted island somewhere in the British Isles.
They are supposed to be a married couple,
but she refuses to let him see her naked in the bathtub.
Evidently they are one of those troubled couples
who are trying to overcome a tragedy - like in
Vacancy
.
The shore station does not respond on the radio. Soldier-boy Jack (Jamie Bell - Jumper ) staggers into their farmyard, with a head wound and pistol. He tells a story that there is a South American epidemic, an airborne disease that has spread globally. Then he starts to fortify the house ...
The story of three people stuck together on a deserted island is reminiscent of Eye of the Needle, the first feature film by Richard Marquand , with the exterior threat as the Second World War instead of a virus epidemic. In comparison, this effort does not fare well. The three main cast members all deliver strong performances, as befits their combined decades of experience. However, the plot itself is sub- M Night Shyamalan .
This is a post-apocalyptic story based on a work by Literature novelist
Cormac McCarthy
. Viggo Mortensen (
Lord of the Rings
) and his pre-teen son wander the hills of Appalachia.
It is full of sadistic cannibalistic hill-billies,
so you will be happy to know that not much has changed.
In between flashbacks of
Charlize Theron
, the wandering duo encounter suspicious characters like Robert Duval (
Secondhand Lions
) and Michael K Williams (
Flash Forward
). Guy Pearce (
Lockdown
) and
Molly Parker
also make an appearance at the end.
The cause of the apocalypse is never explained, it could be a nuclear war or a supervolcano but apparently the writer intended an asteroid-induced Extinction Level Event like in Armageddon . After ten years of nuclear winter, the crops and the animals have all died. The only sources of food available are scavenged supplies, and human flesh. The man and his boy only have two bullets between them, to use on themselves. Yes, even by apocalypse standards this is quite bleak!
This is set in a post-apocalyptic world, with a twist.
Just as 1970s movies like
Mad Max
had all the main characters living in automobiles in a desert,
and the 1990s effort
Waterworld
had everyone on boats in a post-Global Warming world,
this movie has everyone travel about in light aircraft.
It seems that a river of wind known as the Slipstream
has destroyed all other forms of transportation or something.
It is not really explained beyond that,
but this is not the kind of film that one watches for the worldbuilding.
A drifter named Matt Owens (Bill Paxton - Aliens ) falls foul of a couple of law enforcers, Tasker (Mark Hamill - Star Wars: ANH ) and Belitski ( Kitty Aldridge ). After they confiscate his illegal goodies he steals custody of their prisoner, Byron (Bob Peck - Jurassic Park ), in order to claim the bounty for himself.
Matt takes Byron down-stream, stopping off at a series of settlements along the way. The first place is run by a criminal (Robbie Coltrane - Harry Potter ), and the next one by a religious zealot named Avatar (Ben Kingsley - Sound of Thunder ). Finally they get a museum full of rich old people led by Cornelius (F Murray Abraham - Mimic ).
The cinematography is flat, as if this was shot on the cheap for television. It actually got a cinema release, instead of going straight-to-video. The landscapes look nice enough, considering this is basically Welsh countryside, but we can probably thank the Second Unit director for that. The only time that the movie gives any hint of characterisation is when the music swells whenever Byron does some magical-seeming miracle that the plot later explains as just basic science.
So what happened to this film? The cast are all recognisable names and faces, except for the female lead who eventually got married and retired. The nearest comparison might be Willow , which did not have a movie sequel. That said, Willow was a fun fantasy romp while Slipstream is a bit of a drag. One of the problems is that Slipstream lacks a villain figure. Tasker is a strong antagonist, but he is basically a tough cop doing a tough job. This means that the final climax involves derailing two main characters so they come into a violent confrontation.
This is set in a post-apocalyptic Northern Ireland.
Not because Brexit caused an economic crash or brought the Troubles back,
but because when the oil supply ran out the human population plummeted.
Yes, this is a global apocalypse and not just a regional one.
Obviously nobody thought to secure a power supply that used renewable resources.
The title character (Martin McCann - ) lives alone in a cabin in the woods. Civilisation has broken down, but more like in The Road than in a Zom-Pocalypse. He defends himself with boobytraps and a double-barrelled shotgun. Anyone who intrudes gets killed, stripped of clothing, and dumped in a grave so shallow it is basically a scratch in the ground. That said, there are marauders in the woods and nobody can be trusted.
The protagonist's life is turned upside down when an old woman and a tweenage girl ( Mia Goth ) arrive at his campsite. Very cynically, they know the only way that a young woman can pay a lonely man in exchange for a bed for the night. They manage to convince him to let them stay.
The storyline, that of a man with a girl and an older woman, becomes reminiscent of the haunting Japanese tale Onibaba . Later, when food begins to run low and decisions have to be made, it invokes the American movie The Beguiled .
The story was filmed in Northern Ireland, and is clearly set there. However, because it is spared the usual trappings of the Troubles it seems to have found a wider audience worldwide. The low budget and glamour-free treatment of the material clearly label this as an art-house piece. There is a lot of non-sexual nudity, both male and female, which de-glamourises the situation even more. The low budget look is enhanced by some amazing drone footage.
![[Rec] (2007)](../graphics/rec1.jpg)
![[Rec] 2 (2009)](../graphics/rec2.jpg)
![[Rec] 4: Apocalypse (2014)](../graphics/rec4.jpg)
