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.

Hunter Prey (2010)

I watched Hunter Prey on Monday.  I wasn't really sure if I wanted to do a review of it.  I mean, yeah, it was a good movie, but it seemed to be getting a decent amount of praise and it was on Netflix Instant so what was the point nobody likes me anyway.

Then I watched a fourth of Terminator: Salvation and I was all HOLY SHIIIIIIT NO WE GOTTA DO THIS REVIEW

Hunter Prey is by that guy that did Batman: Dead End, which was that fan film where Batman fought the Alien, then the Predator and everyone on Internet 1.0 had no idea what was happening ROMS WHAT ARE DOSE.  Dead End wasn't great by any means, but it was a dorky derivative concept done about as well as you could hope for, and that's exactly the game behind Hunter Prey.  It's hardly doing anything new or interesting, but it's somehow nerd food of the highest order.  If you're the target audience you're probably going to like it just for the fact that it's exactly the sort of crappy movie you thought about with friends, except look it was actually completed.  On thinking about this, it's sort of brilliant that the film avoided anything resembling innovation: it would have destroyed the illusion that we're seeing our subconscious nerd scenarios come forth and play on the computer screen.

This might sound like damning praise, but consider the state of modern science fiction films.  While there's occasionally gems like Moon, generally we get either brainless action films that think they have something to say, or hifalutin REALLY MAKES YOU THINK DONTIT shit done by people who read Ender's Game and think that plot movement is a luxury.  Hunter Prey just aims to tell a story, and fuck it, that's what it does (pretty well).

The plot, in keeping with the nerdishment (get it bros), is basically a collection of sci-fi conventions just different enough that your mind feels clever for recognizing what the director is ripping off without being totally put off by the concepts.  We start off with three space ranger dudes dressed in "totally not clone troopers" gear chasing after a prisoner who crashed their ship and they have to get back by the time rescue arrives because he has the ability to blow up their world!  Yeah.  Thankfully, in keeping with how Dead End went, this plotline resolves itself in about 30 minutes with a twist that you'll probably see coming if you watched a given minute of the film beforehand.

Again, let's give some credit.  The director clearly saw that the target audience would figure out what was going on almost immediately, so he just shrugs his shoulders, gives some action shots, then proceeds to the twist.  Let's compare this to fucking Salvation, which despite having a perhaps even more obvious twist, keeps going and going under the presumption that no one is going to figure out that the convict guy who signed his body to Cyberdyne and then wakes up fifteen years into the machine wars without knowing what is happening is actually a cyborg.  And when it's finally revealed, all the characters are like NO WAY and we get like twenty more minutes of Christian Bale altering the script and argggh this fucking movie.  Hunter Prey gives the surprise, and then just moves onto the rest of the film.  What a nice movie!

Everything about the film, visually wise, is pretty much fun.  You know the movie was filmed in Mexico or something like that, but the scenery is still great, and while there is cgi twin suns and dumb shit like that, it's not obnoxious HAY LOOK ITS AN ALIEN WORLD OOOOO type of thing.  You probably know what I mean, right?  Props are silly (behold the alien computer that is connected by a headphone jack), but the film doesn't spend much time with obnoxious technobabble.  Which is probably for the best, as the aforementioned computer is one of the two bad things about the film.  You see, the computer was pretty clearly ripped off of Cortana, the purple AI lady from Halo that got progressively sluttier as the series progressed.  While there's no sexy holograms here, there's the same weird romantic tension between one of the space rangers and the computer, and it's really hard to tell if we're supposed to just be laughing at a guy being attached to his Vista OS or if it's really intended to be some sort of clever flirting but really just some awkward PUA disaster.

What's the other bad thing?  ENDING.  Without spoiling, after the initial twist, we get roughly 40 minutes of really fun interplay between the two opposing sides, some nice action sequences, conversations that aren't embarrassing, just a nice little sci-fi romp.  Then we get to the final scenes, lots of twists, and while straining credibility, one is still willing to play along.  But then we get to the final pivotal action.  Initially, you think it makes sense, but thinking back, you realize it runs completely contrary to everything forever.

IN SPOILER:  For those that have scene the film, you probably get that I'm talking about the fact that Blue Guy didn't shoot the human, and then just lets the human get the coordinates of the alien planet because uh.  I can sort of get the second thing, as it leaves a sequel open and while it seems kind of insane to give the coordinates, there's probably yet another twist in the wings.  But the first?  No, man.  The human asked why he didn't shoot, and he says "because you didn't" or something like that.  But the problem with that is that it's clearly established that the human didn't shoot the last guy because he needed some way to get the computer or otherwise he wouldn't find the coordinates.  Blue Guy clearly knew this from his talks with Not Cortana, and yet just lets him go.  What.


Ultimately, in a world where there are people defending Terminator Salavation, there's a real need for good, fun science fiction that isn't taking itself hell of seriously.  Hunter Prey, as mentioned above, is a good movie, fanservice for nerds without making one feel like a total creep.