During the preview that Toronto After Dark was nice enough to show me on Saturday afternoon it advertised itself in the following way:
“Every generation has a horror film that defines its culture. This is that film.”
It then proceeded to show me a very well cut together trailer which after watching, I was actually frightened. I was so excited for this movie because it promised so much.
After seeing it all I can really say is… not as advertised. I suspect that this is what you would get if you Frankensteined together Can’t Hardly Wait and 28 Days Later. It really wanted to be a good movie and, in truth, it tried very hard but it just fell so short.
The plot is pretty simple. A virus has taken over two small towns (one of which apparently appears on no map, even though it has a high school which is, presumably, publicly funded) and has turned most of the population into flesh eating zombies. Our protagonists (if they can be called that) are teenagers from the local aforementioned high school. As the movie begins we get very little opportunity to be interested in our main characters before things start going bad. No one was a particular stand out in the cast and really, I wouldn’t actually want to see anyone in another movie, which is unfortunate because this was written by Steven C. Miller to be a trilogy. A bold choice for the first time filmmaker.
The characters set off on a series of highly specific tasks. First it’s to get to the car from the bar. Then it’s to rescue the girlfriend. Then it’s to get to the high school. Then it’s to get to the morgue. There’s really no time to rest. And the characters do the most incredibly annoying things. If you were a 16 or 17 year-old girl and you were in the bathroom at a house party in the woods and you looked out and noticed that everyone at the party was being eaten by everyone else at the party, would you start screaming your head off? Would you scream so loud that everyone knew where you were? Well, not if you wanted to live. And if you were a 16 or 17 year-old boy, would you go to a school where there are likely to be a few hundred hungry, fast zombies with super human strength and sense of smell? Not if you wanted to live. Again and again these characters did things that betrayed the audience’s trust and again and again we disbelieved this chain of events. We didn’t even like them enough to WANT to see them live. Mostly, the audience just wanted to see them die.
And die they did! I do have to give the director credit for some of the more inventive gore I’ve seen in a long time. Certainly, this was where the care went, but it has to be supported by something. Tension has to be held by more than ‘…but Johnny, there’s zombies out there… they look hungry…’ There was no plotline that extended from one act to another, let alone another movie.
The problem here is that there are great moments in this movie, and I must stress *moments*, but it lacks the structure and depth that it’s trying to achieve. It wreaks of ‘first movie’ emotionality and is desperate for a number of rewrites by more seasoned professionals. It doesn’t have particularly bad production values, but I have to interject a question here. Is this the future of filmmaking? Has the wide availability and affordability of the digital camera created an environment where the average Joe can achieve what so many people struggled to do before? CAN anyone really make a movie? If that’s true — if anyone can really make a movie — then this movie is an excellent argument for the question of *should* anyone make a movie, just because they can? I’ve never made a movie. Written a few, yes, but actually cast, shot, edited and screened a movie, no. That puts me in the awkward position of criticizing those who have and I’m not trying to diminish the achievement in doing so, but I do know enough about movies to know when it doesn’t ring true. When the actions of the characters are so extremely frustrating; when perfectly good characters are wasted on very, very bad death scenes; when plot points are spoon fed to us in the manner of a daytime soap opera (with lighting about as good); when it just doesn’t work. And this movie doesn’t.
I hope that it does well enough for Mr. Miller, and it’s worth noting that this has actually been distributed by Dimension Extreme, but I certainly won’t be seeing Automaton Transfusion: Contingency and I pity those who do.
