Battledogs (2013)

In a desperate attempt to start writing again, I've started to get back to the roots of this blog, which is to say I've been watching alot of terrible Syfy original films that no one cares about the quality of.  Let's face it, one only watches the Syfy Originals if there is basically nothing else on.  You will either sit there, seeing the bad actors try to determine how to beat the rubber cgi shitlord, or you will realize there is an outside and/or books and turn off the television.  And yet, I feel the need to analyze these films, since god know the general reviews of these films are "here is a summary, I thought it was a good try, thank you dread central for giving me this life."

Battledogs was an Asylum release from 2013.  Interestingly, it was put out around the cusp of The Asylum transitioning from "shit incoherent ripoffs of popular films" to "shit incoherent mockups of overplayed concepts."  That is to say, Sharknado came out three months after Battledogs, and from that point onward The Asylum realized they could make 20x more money by just distributing movies about stripper zombies and ninja dinosaurs.  Perhaps as a result of this transition, Battledogs is an interesting  divergence from typical Asylum fare.  It's not even remotely good, but there's no obvious movie it's ripping off, and I think we can all agree werewolves were pretty passe in 2013.  Are they still?  Comment on the space below and sound off!

please note this tagline is a fucking lie

My first problem with Battledogs is that when I started watching it, I was expecting something far cooler.  I've always been a fan of "enhanced killer dog" films, such as Man's Best Friend and The Pack, hell, even Pet Semetary 2.  So my initial vision of hearing "Battledogs" was something along the line of SNL's Action Cats.  Instead, we got...

we got...

okay so the second and way bigger problem with Battledogs is that it's honestly kind of impossible to describe the plot.  While much criticism has been justifiably levelled at The Asylum's hackneyed plotlines, that only describes half of the problem.  The real issue is that, at least for dumb horror/science fiction nonsense, Battledogs has the biggest issue with plot shifts I have ever seen.

What do I mean by plot shifts?  Basically, when a film moves of goalposts of what various characters are trying to achieve.  Obviously a film's plot can and probably have twists and surprises, but when you have to guess which characters, subplots, and motivations will matter in a movie that is about werewolves, you have a problem.

The movie begins with a wildlife photographer, Donna (Ariana Richards, who was the girl from Juarassic Park and whose last movie was Tremors 3 in 2001) turning into a werewolf in JFK airport, which raises a big ole' ruckus and leads to a shitton of people also being latent werewolves, leading to them being detained in WEREWOLF JAIL.  On the side of good is some military CDC guy (Craig Sheffer, or "that guy from Hellraiser Inferno that I actually really liked what are you doing here mang").  On the other side are bad military guys, led by the general in charge of the facility (Dennis Haysbert, that black guy from 24), whose initial plan is to turn the werewolves into the ultimate anti-insurgent military force.

After reading that last sentence, you might be thinking "hey that doesn't sound like a very good idea," it isn't, but surprisingly after an hour of Evil General ranting and raving about the genius of his plan, he just sort of...abandons it after a couple of test runs don't work.  This is the most obvious example of what I was talking about before.  There's no scenes of him questioning his plan, he just suddenly shifts from trying to create an army of Battledogs to him trying to find Donna because she is Patient Zero and he's seen all the movies about killer diseases and therefore she has the cure.  What is he wanting with the cure?  Fuck if I know, but he never talks about his ultimate plan ever again.

this was legitmately too good not to add

There's just so many scenes and plot points that ultimately have no point.  For instance, there's a three minute scene of some asshole guy being processed into the facility, with him talking about how he's going to get everyone if he possibly can.  A secondary antagonist, you think?  Instead, the next time we see him he's being herded into an interrogation room by Evil General to fight with another werewolf to test "combat capability" which would almost make sense, except that after asshole guy wins and reverts to his human form, Evil General orders a soldier to shoot the asshole in the head.  When the good scientist goes back to the airport to try to figure out who Patient Zero is (this is after he talked to Donn who point blank told him she was Patient Zero), the airport security coordinator shows him the airport's HOLOGRAM SNAPSHOTS, which serve no purpose except to remind our retarded hero that that photographer existed and is never used for any purpose again.

Really, the
dumbest plot point is what I referred to my ladyfriend as "Chekhov's Wolf."  See, Donna reveals later on that she was bitten by a giant wolf while in Canada.  This wolf is constantly referred to and described by various characters.  Obviously, since this is a Syfy/The Asylum production, there is never any travel to Canada to confront the giant wolf, nor do you even get to see the wolf.  Instead, the only purpose this story has is after it's revealed that the woman's blood is not an antibody to the werewolf virus, someone looks at an x-ray and see that there's the wolf's fang in her arm, and that -is- the cure!  If your immediate reaction to that is "then why even bother having all that shit about Patient Zero and antibodies," then why haven't you been paying attention to this review at all?

If you ignore the fact that the film basically spends half of its running time on plotlines that resort to absolutely nothing, it's not an altogether terrible film in relation to most Syfy pictures.  That is to say, you can actually see the monsters (don't get me wrong, the cgi is absolutely terrible but if you're complaining about that how many Syfy movies have you seen before you FUCKING POSER) and the moments of action can distract you sufficiently from your terrible life.  All of the main players are sufficient for the source material.  Special mention goes to Bill Duke (the chaingun guy from Predator and the cocky Green Beret from Commando) who plays the President, and who has an agent that was smart enough to demand that all of his scenes be filmed separately, so every so often the movie is interrupted by a scene of Bill Duke sitting in a chair/car/podium and saying "oh yes the werewolf situation is getting worse you don't say well keep me posted."

The only issue I have with the cast, and one that I am sort of loath to mention this because every other review of Battledogs I skimmed didn't mention this.  For the life of me, I cannot tell the goddamned difference between Donna and the token female doctor.  I'm not sure if it's face blindness or some sort of latent blonde racism, but I could not recognize them solely by their face/voice/breasts/horrifying female aura.  For the most part, this problem was negated by the fact that the doctor wore a labcoat, but this was no longer a protection in the final part of the movie, which is really a perfect summation of everything good/bad/whatever about Battledogs so let's just discuss it.  SPOILERS obviously.

In a HUGE SURPRISE all of the werewolf people escape after Donna has a big old freakout because that is a thing I guess.  They proceed to rampage through New York, and by rampage I mean "two scenes of them attack people standing in front of greenscreens of New York landmarks."  Donna, the doctor who has lost her labcoat oh no I am thinking what do I do I can't tell them apart anymore, and Worthless Protagonist escape into a helicopter, which is immediately hijacked by Evil General, who is now also a werewolf.  Evil General captures one of the women but oh god which one, which prompts Our Hero I Guess to stab himself with Chekhov's Wolf's tooth and have a horrible CGI wolf battle.  This is thankfully resolved by one of the women shooting the bad wolf with a rocket launcher.

But wait, due to the werewolf attack, the president is planning to launch a nuke on New York!  Captain Garbage finds a radio and manages to get the president to stop the order just in time, except the pilot launching the nuke accidentally brushes his hand on the wrong lever and drops a nuke anyway.  Puddle of Military manages to escape with one of the girls, since I guess the other died after launching the rocket launcher.

srsly who is this please help

But that's okay, since the two that survived get to make out since all that a nuke did was catch a few buildings on fire.

 I don't think you really need to say anything more about a movie like this, do you?

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Zombie Apocalyspe is a stupid mess.  It's clear that there was virtually no budget to speak of, the director and cinematographer had no camera shots available at any time aside from "mid range of fronts" or "mid range of backs," the actors were literally one step above community actors, and the plot just sort of wanders around a map before arriving at the payoff scene that is like spending your life savings at a slot machine only to realize it only dispenses those gross little chocolate coins Jewish people have during holidays.

Despite all that, I'd put it in the upper 50th percentile of trashy zombie films and/or Syfy originals.  Hell, let's say upper 75th percentile.  What gives?

The biggest reason is sort of a damning with faint praise, but have you have seen budget zombie horror?  Zombie Apocalypse is bad, every element of it barely working, but goddamn at least it could be called a horror movie with trashy action that barely works.  Compare this to something like Monster Ark, where you spend a good half of the movie of people talking about the Bible like it is a mysterious artifact only read by madmen and gods, and then segue to people waving their airsoft M-16s at a greenscreen for the other half.  Zombie Apocalypse had the good graces to interrupt scenes of people walking empty streets and CGI explosions to include zombie battles, and while those battles are entirely shoddy CGI (PHOTOSHOP THAT BLOOD SPURT HARDER), they're at least entertaining enough for me to have finished the movie stone sober.  The plot is followable and does have a destination and doesn't try to overextend ambition beyond what it can barely accomplish.

The acting is bad, but at least when they're not being forced to speak utterly awful lines (ARE THERE ANY HUMANS IN THERE), there's sort of a fun awkwardness to their acting, being fully comfortable (Ving Rhames and that chick from Spartacus: Blood and Sand that wanted to ride Crixus's bone included) in being in a terribad zombie film, as opposed to, say, the Day of the Dead where it appeared Nick Cannon and everyone else was being filmed at gunpoint.  The only exception to this is Taryn Manning, whose sullenness in the film is pretty clearly not just acting, but she's virtually a non-entity in the second half of the movie so who really cares.

Indeed, especially for an Asylum film, there's a fairly intelligent apportioning of focusing on characters that you can almost care about, as opposed to the usual Asylum practices of giving the meatiest roles to people who don't know how not to glance nervously at the camera every five seconds.  Maybe they hired an editor with a soul, who knows?  Perhaps the best part (spoiler but again who fucking cares) concerns the role of "token educated dude who in zombie film parlance means he is a flowery dipshit who quotes a line from Wordsworth and acts like he's hot shit.  Of course, he's easily the worst character in the film and one prays for his death, but as the halfway mark, you feel like he's somehow going to make it to the film.  Even worse, he has an awful romance scene with another survivor and now you're virtually sure he's going to survive SO MAD.  But then he gets bitten (due to his own dumbassery), and turns even before he can do anything heroic!  It's a really rare moment of schadenfreude fanservice coming out of nowhere, and while it was probably unintentional considering the rest of the script, one must take what they can get.

So is it worth watching?  There's certainly better zombie films out there, but there's far, far, worse.  If anything, this is a positive step for Syfy and Asylum, so we may as well be nice enough about it as possible.