Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Between 2-9 of November American Film Market had it's annual convention where a lot of movie deals are done. I would love to go there someday, just for window shopping and getting free candy and pens from the booths belonging to every hopeful distributor on the planet. Anyway, I heard somewhere - and I don't know if it's true or not - that around 250 zombie movies was for sale this year! Seems like the market is a bit over-saturated with the living dead. I'm not saying it's 250 BAD zombie movies, but I'm sure the majority of these are utter trash. Therefore I decided to check out what TV had to offer, and I felt SyFy's Zombie Apocalypse was the way to go. Produced by controversial company The Asylum, a gang of people who proudly make professional low budget versions of big budget blockbusters. Zombie Apocalypse was probably, somewhere along the road, inspired by the success of The Walking Dead, but that's about it. This is it's own universe, and believe me or not, but it works quite good.

A couple of months after the zombie epidemic wiped out 90 percent of the earths population, and the governments - trying to stop the spreading of the virus - bombed us all to hell with electromagnetic pulse bombs, we're completely fucked. We join a couple of old friends, wandering aimlessly outside on the countryside. After one of them bites the dust by the hands of zombies, another gang of more professional zombie-hunters saves them and together they continue a city where a boat will meet them and take the to the Catalina Island. But the road there is dangerous and the zombies are slowly getting smarter and more vicious. There's several kind of zombies to look out for, both running and walking - and then we have the animals... Will they make it?! I won't tell you of course, but come on, this is a SyFy movie!

I've seen more than a few zombie flicks during the last years, or related - like mutated people, people with an aggressive illness etc. I guess this one falls in-between, because the zombies (which they are called) both shows signs of being dead and having a virus of some kind. I guess they die fast and then become living deadheads! Some have been stinkers, some have been good and some a little bit of both. UK-African co-production The Dead was a disappointment and I can't recommend it at all, Serbian Apocalypse of the Dead was trashy fun, the Mattei-flicks was cheap and great, I dig the Resident Evil-franchise... and even if some people says the opposite, I would say that Nick Lyon's Zombie Apocalypse belongs with the good one's. But this is still a TV-movie, made on a fairly low budget and extremely generic. If you can handle those facts, you're in for a treat.

The script is pretty straight forward, which could have been a failure - because no one likes a boring zombie movie. But the story is built up with a good amount of tension and likable characters. You have zombie attacks every ten minute or so, but they never get repetitive. There's a point with every attack, from killing of a character to introduce the characters to a new adventure. It helps that the zombie make-up is good (I was a bit worried when I saw the behind the scenes-stills at The Asylum's homepage, but you can't compared unprocessed stills with the finished product) and the dialogue is down to a minimum. Because I HATE when people talk just for the sake of talking, and in low budget movies that means that the script isn't good enough. Here they talk when they need to, and usually say good stuff. Most importantly they made the world, or the US, look deserted and post-apocalyptic, which is very impressive considering the budget, and adds to the atmosphere.

Gore? Well, this is a movie made for the SyFy Channel, but it could be the bloodiest SyFy production I've seen. True to The Asylum's traditions the gore is digital, but it's used in such a frenzy that it works fine. A lot of heads is being chopped off, body parts and blood spurting and a high body count - and an even higher zombie count. I'm not sure if the SyFy version was edited for violence, it usually happens on that channel, but if so I hope there will be an even bloodier version on BD as soon as possible!

Battle of Los Angeles (2011)

Isn’t strange, every time The Asylum releases one of their mockbusters, which is no different from all the fantastic rip-offs from Italy, Indonesia, India, Turkey etc, 90 percent of the worlds cult-movie fans unites in the defence for boring, crappy, 100 million dollar budget blockbusters! Yes, that’s the only time it’s OK (except when Uwe Boll makes a movie) to protect the artistic sensibilities and qualities of Battle: Los Angeles and similar movies.

Can it be so that making a commercial “blockbuster” with one million dollars is more controversial than spending a small country's national budget on one crappy, nationalistic mess? I think so, at least for those that think a low budget movie must look like Al Adamson (bless him by the way, a genius) or Fred Olen Ray (not sure I want him to be blessed, but what the fuck!).

What we have here is a case of international Jante Law (“Jantelagen” in Sweden). Let me quote from Wikipedia:

The ten rules state:

Don't think you're anything special.

Don't think you're as good as we.

Don't think you're smarter than we.

Don't convince yourself that you're better than we.

Don't think you know more than we.

Don't think you are more important than we.

Don't think you are good at anything.

Don't laugh at us.

Don't think anyone cares about you.

Don't think you can teach us anything.

That’s what it’s all about, nothing else. The Asylum make low budget action-fests, monster-mayhems and disaster-flicks, using digital explosions and one or two washed-up has been-actors – and they’re proud of that, because they manage to make movies instead of whining like some catholic school girl stuck in Anton LaVey’s pool-party!

So why is Battle of Los Angeles better than Battle: Los Angeles? Here the reasons:

• Big scale battles. Where the blockbuster effectively transforms a fun invasion-flick to another of those Iraq-dramas with claustrophobic shots and boring let’s sacrifice ourselves for the humanity, the mockbuster offers nice wide-angle shots (steady shots too) of the action, big houses exploding – cheap effects of course – with around the same amount of lead actors like the blockbuster.

• The 1942 battle of LA! One of the things I was looking forward too when I first saw the trailer for the blockbuster was the connection to the 1942 incident. Which in the movie is more or less nada! The mockbuster, on the other hand, has a close connection to that incident and uses in a fun way with a few twists and turns.

• The blockbuster clearly has more aliens, but the mockbuster has one big-ass motherf**king alien which actually looks very cool and well-made. It stays in its ship, but if they ever make a sequel I hope they would unleash it on some poor city! Hell, just use the computer model in another production, it’s a damn fine monster!

• The mockbuster have a chick with a samurai sword. The blockbuster doesn’t.

Battle of Los Angeles is a cheap movie. It’s hard to say it even has a battle of LA, because most of it is set on a base outside LA and when they finally enter LA it’s more of an industrial sandpit. But it keeps up the pace and never, which should be banned in these kinda movies, divulges itself in pretentiousness and pretending to have a message or have something important to say.

But before I let you go, let me first explain that with “washed-up has been-actors” I mean actors that I love and care for a lot. Check them out in The Asylum’s movies and you’ll see that they’re giving it all! They playing a big role again, a hero or a bad guy, and they’re the star again – so they just don’t give a fuck about what movie it is, they makes the best they can and work hard for the little money they get.

That’s movie magic, friends.

8213: Gacy House (2010)

When Paranormal Activity came The Asylum released Paranormal Entity, which was a very decent rip-off and in some parts even better than the movie it tried to copy (read my review here). Now, closer to the release of Paranormal Activity 2 they are back again, but now with something of their own: 8213: Gacy House!

In 2006 the police found six bodies in the house built where John Wayne Gacy’s old house stood once – or so this movie claims. What they found was hours and hours of recording belonging to the TV-crew being there to shoot some silly Ghost Hunters-style reality show. Actually, I think the show in this movie is called Ghost Hunters… but ya know what I mean. So here we see the footage telling the story of these individuals and their last hours alive…

I’m a sucker for mockumentaries, I’ll admit that with out problems. 8213: Gacy House is, exactly like Paranormal Entity, very uneven with too much time spending on people setting up cameras and a lot of intercuts on blurry infrared-footage. So the first hour or so is kinda slow with just minor paranormal activities like photo frames falling down from falls and some mysterious shadows. But then it change quickly and gets quite intensive and has a couple of very good scares, or at least cool scenes with the ghost of John Wayne Gacy going crazy with his new guests.

It has a couple or outrageous scenes, like when the token medium offers Gacy her young son’s t-shirt or when one of the male characters obviously is getting ready for a real nasty ghost-rape! The actors do good, even if it can be a bit unfocused when everyone is talking at the same time. But the ghost of Gacy is the best. We don’t see much, but it’s a cool idea and the final frames are actually quite eerie.

If you enjoyed Paranormal Entity, like me, I’m sure you will enjoy 8213: Gacy House too.

Sherlock Holmes (2010)

Well, hello hello! Here we have a pleasant surprise! The Asylum has produced mockbusters of are couple of years now, often with stories similar to the big Hollywood-epics they're copying. But with Sherlock Holmes it's just... Sherlock Holmes, and very far away from that blockbuster with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. In this case that's only a good thing, because Rachel Goldenberg's version of Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary character has a lot more charm than you could expect. 

We begin in 1940. The Germans is attacking London, bombing the hell out of it. An old and dying Dr Watson is sitting in his apartment claiming this is the second time he see London burn. He ask his maid if she can write something day, and so be begins to tell a story that begins with a huge sea monster attacking a ship on it's way to London. He and Holmes is getting involved, but Lestrade is dismissing everything as a hoax, just a crazy witness trying to get some attention. When a dinosaur kills a man in East End and a big water pump is stolen in a part, the mystery becomes even bigger and more absurd...

Yes, to be honest. This is a nice little script made on a very low budget. Everything hangs together, and even the sea monster and dinosaur get their explanation, even if you have to stop thinking that it's a bit to complicated. It would have been easier to do some things with out a prehistoric monster and a giant squid! But fuck that. The Asylum-team has shot everything in the UK, and used some marvelous locations and some clever angles to hide that they don't have any budget to build sets with. The cinematography is professional and so even editing and the movie even has a big, pompous score that fits perfect to the story. Rachel Goldenberg directs with a steady hand and if she can continue to direct, she will be the best director in the whole company. 

As usual the visual effects are cheap, but works fine because the story is so absurd anyway. They even have a more cartoonish quality that fits just great. But my favorite character in this movie among the bad guys is neither the dino or squid, it's the ultra-cool retro-style cyborg that blesses the story half way through. It makes the story even more steampunk than it is, and it's quite much after all, and looks great in the movie. We're getting CG-explosions, one animated dinosaur and sea monster, and a cool robo-dragon as a bonus! Everything made with a lot of heart.

But it wouldn't be as great with out some excellent actors. Ben Syder and Gareth David-Lloyd as Holmes and Watson are way better than I would ever expect, with a lot of chemistry and charisma. The dialogue is mostly quite witty, and I actually wish that The Asylum could make another movie with these too now. The main baddie is played with a lot of joy by Dominic Keating.

I can confess that I have a hard time complaining when it comes to this movie. It's way to charming and entertaining, in it's ultra-lowbudget-style, to get irritated at. A well done little matinée that I will revisit many times.

Sherlock Holmes vs RoboDragon vs T-Rex vs Giant Octopus!

Yes, The Asylums next mockbuster finally has a trailer, and of course I'm gonna buy Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes as soon as possible :)

MegaFault (2009)

I've been collecting the movies from Asylum for a while now and getting more and more surprised. There's still not much originality, but I never been in the movie-collecting business for unique experiences - even if I love those when I get a chance to see one. People who praises Asian and European rip-offs from the eighties and at the same time think it's disgusting to see The Asylum make a buck or two by doing the exact same thing are just hypocrites. This is what exploitation-movies are. I'm not saying Asylums movies are masterpieces, but I don't think the old classics in the genre are masterpieces either, and some of them are very bad - like Alien vs Hunter. Today I've seen MegaFault, an "original", story. But obviously inspired by 2012 (which makes it the third 2012-inspired movie from Asylum so far) and a lot of other older and new disaster movies. 

Brittany Murphy stars as Dr. Amy Lane, a geologist (or seismologist... or whatever) that together with her boss, Dr. Mark Rhodes (Bruce Davison) discovers that the world is about to end. After saving an explosives expert, Boomer (Eriq La Salle), from an early death, they together tries to stop the disaster: a hug crack in the world, threatening to go all around our dear globe (which echoes Andrew Martonäs lovely A Crack in the World from 1965) and killing us all! At the same time Dr Amy's family is in danger and of course she wants to save them to!

Not much of a story, but this is a competent made SyFy Channel-movie with a trio of good actors that don't sleep through their performances. Eriq La Salle could be the new black Arnold Vosloo (they have an uncanny resemblance in this movie) and Bruce Davison is a more than competent character-actor who gives some credibility to the movie. If I was heterosexual I would marry Brittany Murphy the way she was and looked ten years ago, but here she's not looking well at all. Thin and pale, and sometime it seems like she's shaking. But she still makes a good job, thought it probably was a paycheck-job. A sad thing she left us so early. 

But a disaster movie is all about the disasters of course. MegaFault is The Asylums most expensive movie so far, and it looks big and slick. But compared to 2012 it's a cheap, cheap movie. But we're treated to a lot of disasters, mostly earthquakes where the effects goes from primitive to really impressive. What makes them work even better is that the camera is moving all the time, either on the ground or during arial shots - so that fools us to believe it's more real than it is. A static shot in low budget movies like this are often less convincing, and director David Michael Latt knows his homework. The best stuff is the huge arial footage where cities and landscapes a crumbling underneath us, and some of the avalanche-stuff looks great too. There's also a volcano, but we see very little of this and the lava and heat-effects is quite boring. 

Not a bad b-movie at all, and now I'm waiting for 2012: Doomsday directly from my favorite Thai shop, so hopefully I'll be enjoying that movie in a week or so. But I'm sure there will be more The Asylum-movies until then, whether you like it or not!

A new upcoming classic from The Asylum!

Sherlock Holmes, a giant octopus, a dragon AND a T-Rex. Sign me up for this one!