Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies (Timothy Haug, Wyntergrace Williams, Kaitlin Mesh, dir. Mark Newton) Originally titled (more accurately but less enticingly)
Kudzu Zombies, the no-budget horror-comedy
Attack of the Southern Fried Zombies isn't nearly as amusing as its revamped title. Slapped together with limited locations, shaky acting and distractingly poor CGI,
Attack doesn't do anything new with the zombie formula, as an experimental herbicide (meant to wipe out the invasive kudzu plant that is rampant in the southern U.S.) somehow turns people into undead monsters (sometimes with incredibly fake-looking leaves and shoots growing out of them). The filmmakers barely even attempt to explain the plot, just hand-waving about scientific experimentation so that they can get to rampaging zombies at a carnival. The humor is weak, the characters are barely one-dimensional (and the large ensemble makes it tough to invest in the survival of anyone in particular) and the action is chaotic. Only the aerial shots (possibly captured thanks to the crop-dusters that were clearly the filmmakers' main asset) look remotely professional, and it's hard to stage a convincing zombie apocalypse when normal daily activity is clearly going on in the frame behind your characters. Movies like this need to get by on clever writing and lively pacing to make up for their budgetary shortfalls, but
Attack is sluggish and plodding. The most entertaining part is the hard rock title song during the closing credits, but with the change to the new title, even that ends up missing the mark.
Available on Amazon.
Battle Drone (Louis Mandylor, Dominique Swain, Jason Earles, dir. Mitch Gould) A bunch of mercenaries fight a bunch of remote-controlled death-bots in a movie that mainly resembles watching somebody else play a not particularly interesting video game.
Battle Drone writer-director Mitch Gould wastes little time in setting up his basic premise, as the
A-Team/
Expendables-style group of rogue operatives is recruited to retrieve a cache of weapons at Chernobyl (yes, the actual Chernobyl), where they are then used as test subjects for a new line of "battle drones," cyborg soldiers controlled by human pilots from a remote location. The group, led by hardened but honorable ex-soldier Vincent Reikker (Louis "brother of Costas" Mandylor), takes on the robots in a series of repetitive fight scenes that constitute almost the entire movie, while Gould occasionally cuts to the evil government masterminds (plus an arms dealer played by B-movie staple Michael Pare) executing their plan. The character development is minimal, and the banter between Reikker and CIA agent Alexandra Hayes (Dominique Swain) is limp, although at least the movie doesn't try to oversell their sexual chemistry (of which they have none). The effects aren't all that bad for a movie with this presumably limited budget, and the battle drones look sort of like old-school Cylons from
Battlestar Galactica. The action is mediocre at best, though, and Gould relies way too heavily on slo-mo and
Matrix-style bullet time, which adds to the dated video-game feel of the movie (the Chernobyl location, shot possibly somewhere in Canada, is just a convenient empty space for the action, and has no plot relevance). Once the characters run out of things to shoot at, the movie just ends, having exhausted its meager purpose.
Available on Netflix.
Curse of the Mayans (Steve Wilcox, Carla Ortiz, Mark Tacher, dir. Joaquin Rodriguez) Maybe director Joaquin Rodriguez should have just made a documentary about cave-diving in the Yucatan, because that's the only material that works in
Curse of the Mayans (aka
Xibalba), a poorly paced, confusing horror/sci-fi/action movie about the History Channel's favorite subject, ancient aliens. You know you're in for a slog when a movie starts with an expository text crawl followed by an expository voiceover before it even gets to any action, and
Mayans makes almost no sense at all despite all the explanations (if anything, they make it worse). Set in Mexico with dialogue in both English and Spanish (albeit poorly dubbed in both cases, so it's hard to tell what language the actors were actually speaking),
Mayans follows an expedition into the jungle to excavate some Mayan ruins, where the explorers disturb the final resting place of those ancient aliens. The ruins are accessible only via an underground cave system, which allows Rodriguez to shoot that cool, eerie cave-diving footage, but combining it with fake-looking monsters kind of kills the mood. Those monsters don't even show up until the last few minutes, and before that the movie grinds through some dull character drama (complete with a gratuitous sex scene) and some vague warnings about the dangers of disturbing sacred artifacts. The characters are so ill-defined and the action is so murky that it's tough to tell who's being killed off and/or possessed by monsters during the climax, but the movie ends with another nonsensical voiceover that seems to render it all irrelevant anyway.
Available on Amazon and elsewhere.
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