I would have loved it if it weren't just another stupid zombie flick...

Campy dialogue. Ridiculous plot. Absolutely no scientific validity to things like launching yourself into the air with a bazooka and surviving, let alone being able to fire a machine gun attached to a stump of a leg. There was tons of things about this movie I really liked, even loved. Yet I didn’t love it. In fact, I was glad to finally have it be over. And why? Because it was another stupid, lazy zombie flick.

I just can’t get into zombie movies. They bore me to tears, and make me feel ripped off. There’s no real thought put into a zombie movie. Gas, toxic chemical, weird voodoo or something of that sort is turning people into flesh eating, mindless fiends that are only stoppable by cutting them to pieces, shooting them to pieces, or otherwise reducing them to goo. If you get bit, you’ll become one, too. Mankind is doomed. Whatever.

There’s no cool villain to root against. Often we get pointless deaths just to provoke some kind of a reaction from the audience. Barring that, the movie relies on lots of splatter to get a reaction. I’ll give Planet Terror nods to that. There is plenty of gore for the sake of gore, which is another lazy fallback that makes me yawn.

This movie frustrated me to no end because it has cheese all over it. A go go dancer calls herself Cherry Darling and wants to be a stand up comic, yet gets insulted when people point out her name sounds like a stripper. Then when she loses a leg she cries “How am I going to be a stand up comedian now?” That’s just beautiful! Then as she’s walking around with the leg from a table as a prosthetic, the renegade soldier ordering her around calls her “Peg.” Priceless! There is a ton of cornball dialogue and character interaction that make me laugh, but then it all went to rot when I had to deal with the damn zombie/people turning into zombie scenes.

Plus, the story drags. Maybe it flowed better in the shortened double feature version, but the full length just keeps going and going and going with lots of diversionary scenes with secondary characters just meant to fill up time. Yes, they’re interesting, but the movie could have been over at least half an hour earlier, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I do appreciate the uniqueness of how this movie blends 70’s stylings with modern. The costumes are full-on 70’s, the cars are sweet classics, but then we have people text messaging all over the place. It gives the whole thing a surreal feel. The addition of little details like “missing reels” and the simulation of old projector film adds to the right atmosphere.

The cast all do great in their roles, no matter how scattered and small they may have been. Naturally Rose McGowan steals the show, between being “I can’t help but hate her” beautiful, and having the right delivery for her cheesy, cheesy lines, and being able to shoot at people with her leg and make it look believable. There are tons of cameos, as well, including Bruce Willis and Quentin Tarantino.

If this just wasn’t a zombie and gore for the sake of gore story, I would be a happy camper. However, it is a zombie and gore for the sake of gore story, so no matter how many cheap laughs it gave me, Planet Terror will never be a movie I watch again, let alone own. If you love Robert Rodriguez movies and zombies and gore, you’re in for a treat. If you’re like me and demand a little bit more from your cheese, you’ll be disappointed, and a little nauseated.

Tags: gore for the sake of gore, Grindhouse Presents Planet Terror, movie review, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, zombie movie, zombies

Get him! He might star in a sequel!

This. Was. Terrible. Point, shoot, bang, it needs to be dead. Please, please, please to the powers that be out there, do not make a sequel like you set up for. It’s not worth it. This first film wasn’t worth it. I understand you were just trying to trick people into watching your movie first by rushing it to completion and releasing it before the big blockbuster, I Am Legend. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? You’ve inflicted enough pain on my tender psyche.

Why did I even bother to watch I Am Omega? I knew it was going to be a zombie flick, and I’ve never enjoyed zombie flicks. But I thought, maybe with the obvious plot lifting of The Omega Man and The Last Man On Earth and I Am Legend that they could cobble something together that would keep me interested. Instead, it just proves that I still haven’t acquired a taste for zombies, and that no one bothered to try to tell a story here.

It starts off with a lot of promise, with Mark Dacascos playing Renchard, presumably the last living soul. Through some unobtrusive flashbacks we learn he lost his wife and child to the virus and resulting zombie overflow. He eats his meals with a mannequin for company, pays cash to corpses when he takes their beer, and has a very intricate security system to fend off attacks. He’s also going a wee bit nuts, and plays it well. Sadly, this isn’t enough to hold up the story, and I found myself checking how much time was left less than thirty minutes into it.

Somehow his computer still works and connects well enough to the internet to receive incoming video. We see that there is at least one survivor in the middle of New York City, and she wants him to come get her. He wisely decides he’s better off holed up where he’s at, especially since he’s wired the city to blow up, and ignores her.

Enter two psychotic soldiers in a dirty white van. They ask him to help them rescue the girl, because her blood has the anti-virus to save humanity. When he still says no, they insist by blowing up his house. So off they go to rescue the damsel. They don’t get far before their stupidity kills one of them off, and the survivor of the pair won’t leave the body to continue the mission. Renchard has to go in alone to get the girl.

It gets more ludicrous and confusing from there. The writers just throw in more zombies, cars that won’t start, a girl with an oddly superior attitude for someone getting rescued from zombies, and the surviving solider going more than a little over the cuckoo’s nest, all in the name of stretching this painful test of endurance out to the requisite time requirement.

At another point I swear Renchard is going zombie, because they show him getting scratched, and then he gets shot. Almost immediately they put on a thick layer of pale makeup on him, and do weird camera angles. As he fights off the now bad-guy soldier they continue to flash on him as if he were using zombie strength. Then after all that, nothing. This may sound like a spoiler, but seriously, I’m saving you a good ninety minutes of pain by letting you know upfront that Renchard won’t go ‘native’ at the end. Perhaps knowing that you won’t feel the compulsion to waste time on this.

This movie has the same intellectually degenerating impact as chugging one of those huge 40 ounce bottles of Olde English from back in your college days. You’ll end up feeling about as queasy and guilty the morning after, too.

Tags: god awful, I Am Legend, Last Man On Earth, Mark Dacascos, Omega Man, painful test of endurance, zombies

Alrighty, then. Black Swarm can’t decide if it wants to be a bug infestation flick, or a zombie flick, so it tried, unsuccessfully, to combine the two. yawn.

I’m probably being overly critical of this movie. Zombie tales have always left me cold, and when I sat down to watch Black Swarm I was extremely tired. When I’m tired I am very difficult to please.

Be that as it may, lazy writing five minutes into the script turned me off, and it just continued through the entire, agonizing, two hours. It was supposed to be important to know that the man you see killed off in the opening sequence has an identical twin. So how do they make sure you’re aware of this? They show headlines in newspapers proclaiming that a twin is killed in a freak accident. Not a man, or a worker, but a twin. I can’t think of any newspaper, even in a small town, that would resort to such a headline, except in bad cinema.

You’d think that this would be crucial to the plot, since they made such a big deal about it. It’s only crucial to the thinly woven, melodramatic relationship among two of the main characters. I was expecting perhaps a genetic code plot twist. Something. Anything more than a high school romantic triangle that would never happen in real life. This was just a tired, useless, plot device. Again, yawn.

So what’s at the heart of this movie? Wasps have been engineered by the government. These wasps are going around laying eggs in the citizens of a small town and turning them into drones (a.k.a. zombies). These wasps are vicious, territorial, unstoppable. Great. Wonderful. I don’t care. Just get me to the end so I can see a surviving wasp crawl from a nest, warning me there will be a sequel.

The only good thing about Black Swarm is Robert Englund. Period. He’s too good for a movie like this. He delivers his lines like the professional he is. He deserves so much better. At least when he did Python, that was a movie with the right amount of camp and humor to believe he took that role for the fun of it. Black Swarm should have been fun, but it was horrifying in all the wrong ways. Not even showing an Elm Street sign in the middle of the film, a blatant nod to Robert Englund’s infamous role, could save this.

Next time I have a wasp nest in my yarn, I may just leave it alone instead of removing it. Wasps have suffered enough already by being ‘featured’ in this waste of time.

Tags: bugs, not so original, zombies