Zombie Nation (2004)

A cop kidnaps women off the street then kills them and buries their bodies, while he has flashbacks to his abusive childhood. His partner and other police wonder what he is doing but do little about it. Then there are the voodoo practitioners who bring some of the victims back to life so they can exact their own revenge.

The story is muddled. I still don’t understand the scene of the abusive furniture customer. The acting is atrocious. The ending is ridiculous. The title, Zombie Nation, comes from one line in the movie and is not to be confused with a concept that could lead to a potentially good movie. The police station is a warehouse with “POLICE” painted on the door. The police car (there is only one) is someone’s family sedan.

This movie is mind numbingly awful. Director Ulli Lommel should be tried for crimes against the horror genre.

Solar Attack (aka Solar Strike) (2005)

The Sun is erupting and sending CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) towards Earth. Initially these solar showers take out communications satellites, then they start destroying cities, then small countries (eg New Zealand), and the prediction is that the methane in the atmosphere will ignite, burning up all the oxygen and end life on Earth. Mark Dacascos (playing Dr Lucas Foster, a billionaire industrialist) may have a radical solution.

A world threatening diaster. An environmental message. A fictitious government department (SNEL, Solar and Near Earth Laboratory, with a director who refuses to believe the hero). A black president (Lou Gosset Jr). American and Russia on the verge of starting a nuclear war. What more could you want?

World ending disaster movies are a recurring theme in Hollywood (When Worlds Collide, Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, etc), and they may have had bigger budgets, but they didn’t have Mark Dacascos (I Am Omega). Okay, so this movie pretty tame, and they can’t afford to show much of the destruction, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like it (even if the story is reminiscent of other movies, especially Solar Crisis, Sunshine, and Supernova).

Kiss Of The Vampire (aka Immortally Yours) (2009)

A vampire (Daniel Goddard from the Beastmaster tv series) falls in love with a woman whose father is a scientist working for the Illuminati (you might remember them as the big bad in Lara Croft Tomb Raider:) Why an immortal would fall for someone as plain as Katherine Hawkes (star and writer of the film) is one of the mysteries in this movie. The relationship causes complications with the Illuminati who control what goes on in the world and who are obsessed with the search for immortality. The Illuminati currently think vampires may be the key to never ending life.

Meanwhile, in the world of ordinary humans, the police hire a vampire slayer to help eliminate a rogue pack of vampires.

What happens in this movie is of little interest, but it does lead to one of the most unsatisfying endings to a film I have seen.

A film with Matthias Hues (Dark Angel), Gary Daniels (American Streetfighter), and Martin Kove (The Karate Kid) should have much better action scenes than Kiss Of The Vampire does. It is even questionable if Kiss Of The Vampire has any genuine action scenes. The vampires are the most unthreatening I have seen. They dress and act like extras in a video clip for a soft metal band.

In the long, long list of cheap and dodgy movies I have seen, Kiss Of The Vampire may be the cheapest and dodgiest. It’s production values make day time soaps seem sophisticated. My favourite piece of cheapness was the room in someone’s house they attempted to use as a restaurant. Adding some tables does not make a living room look like a fancy restaurant.

Maybe there is a competition between producers to make the worse vampire film possible. Kiss of The Vampire is even worse than ">Dracula 3000.

Underworld Rise Of The Lycans (aka Underworld 3) (2009)

In the Dark Ages the world was blue and the pretentious vampires kept hairy humans (who were werewolves) as slaves. If Underworld Rise Of The Lycans can be taken as historically correct.

Sonja (Rhona Mitra from Doomsday), is the vampire daughter of the vampire king Viktor (Bill Nighy from The Boat That Rocked) and she is secretly having an affair with one of the slaves, Lucian (Michael Sheen from Frost/Nixon). Meanwhile the Lycans are becoming increasingly restless with the bloodsuckers lording it over them and a battle is looming.

They keep making these movies, and I keep watching them in the hope they will get the formula right, but they never do. The cast is good, but the script and direction are forgettable and more lifeless than the vampires.

Virtuality (TV Pilot) (2009)

Earth finally makes it in to space as the 12 person crew of the Phaeton heads out on a 10 year mission (To boldly go where no man has gone before?) to explore a nearby star system (before the Earth becomes uninhabitable). To make life more interesting for the crew, the ship is fitted with a Virtual Reality program so they can escape the monotony and live out their fantasies. To make the trip more interesting for the people on Earth, the Phaeton’s journey is a reality show with cameras catching all the action.

Virtuality was a proposed television series that was not continued after the pilot. I’m not sure how the makers would have maintained the interest had it continued. Nothing much happens in the pilot which introduces the crew and their relationships and sets up the mystery of a dangerous element infecting the VR program (shades of HAL9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey). The novelty of a small, confined crew works okay for a movie (Dark Star) but usually you need to introduce an outside force (Alien) to make it more interesting, or many outside factors if you turn it in to an ongoing series (Lost In Space). Virtuality needed something to make it more interesting. Big Brother is boring on Earth and setting it on a spaceship does not make it more appealing (even when death is involved).

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)

I love a 3D film. I like wearing the cardboard glasses and watching a movie with very little colour. In My Bloody Valentine (a remake of the 1981 movie of the same name), the 3D glasses are green and red rather than the standard red and blue. This doesn’t affect the 3D effects, but it does mean the only truly noticeable colour in the movie is blue.

The story is a typical stalk and slash splatter fest. A crazy killer in a mine is presumed dead but reappears on Valentine’s Day 10 years later, coinciding with the return to the town of the mine’s owner (Jensen Ackles from Supernatural) who is also a survivor the original attack. The owner/survivor finds out his ex-girlfriend (Jaime King from The Tripper) is now married to the sheriff (Kerr Smith from Dawson’s Creek), and that allows for a little male posturing in between the slaughtering. There is also a lengthy full frontal nude scene from Betsy Rue, who does a great acting job while naked.

The story is okay (but derivative and the ending is predictable and revealed too early), but the 3D effects are cool. The killer likes to use a pick axe, and that is often poking out of the screen, as are eyeballs, and assorted bloodied body parts and implements. The novelty factor of 3D (courtesy of a double sided DVD) is a welcome variation to the genre and raises a mediocre film up to the level of fun.

Day Of The Dead 2 Contagium (2005)

The DVD case for this movie advertised it as a prequel to Day Of The Dead, but that is misleading. The opening scene is set in 1968 (presumably before the events of George A Romero’s ground breaking, genre defining Night Of The Living Dead), but the rest of the movie is set in the now.

A group of patients from the Ravenside mental institution (Romero Ward) discover a canister that contains a biological weapon from the sixties. The contents of the canister are released in the hospital turning the occupants in to zombies.

This film is deadful on many levels. The acting is especially bad, and it is mainly the actor’s pretending to be mentally different that is so inept. The rest of the actors, the direction, and the script, are so awful the movie becomes funny. But not clever funny like Reanimator. The effects are okay for a low budget movie, but the biggest offence is claiming this movie fits in to the Living Dead universe. It is an insult to Romero’s work. Dan O’Bannon did a much better job with Return Of The Living Dead, which explored the scenario of living people opening a canister of the zombie gas and becoming the living dead, with much greater skill and style.

The strangest thing about this movie is it makes me want to see Romero do a version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Or maybe I just want to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies made in to a movie.

The House Bunny (2008)

I was reluctant to see this movie, but was won over by the presence of Anna Faris (Scary Movie) who does comedy well starring in a film written by Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz (Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate About You) who have shown an ability to add a twist to stereotypes. I thought that combination might lead to some insight in to homeless Playboy bunnies that I didn’t have. Sadly that was not the case, as the movie lacks any jokes or momentum.

Shelley (Anna Faris) is a Playboy bunny who reluctantly moves out of the Playboy Mansion on her 27th birthday. Shelley has no idea how to survive in the outside world, but stumbles on to a college campus and decides she could be the house mother for a sorority. Shelley ends up at a house of some socially awkward girls who need help to save their sorority (and show them how to be more “popular”). It’s a story we have seen many times (including the classic Revenge Of The Nerds) and it is sad that a female interpretation could not have been more imaginative or engaging.

Full credit to Anna Faris who looks great (better than the models in Playboy) and does what she can with a very uninspired script. Am I the only one who preferred the girls before their makeovers?

Boogeyman 3 (2008)

You can’t keep a good, supernatural, serial killer down, or even a bad one in this case, as the Boogeyman makes his third screen appearance.

The Boogeyman, who looks like a leftover from The Ring, may be real or he may be a figment of the imagination. Either way, students on campus are dieing. The theory that believing in legends makes them real was a good idea, but the rest of the movie is not. I thought the ending was at least going to be a positive in this extremely ordinary slasher movie, but then there was an extra scene that made the finale totally cliched.

To make a bad film worse, they included a superfluous locker room scene to fill the “required” T&A component of the genre. We are doing the same…

The Devil’s Chair (2006)

Nick West (Andrew Howard doing his best Jason Statham impersonation) heads to an abandoned mental institution with his girlfriend for a round of drugs and sex. The girlfriend ends up dead and Nick ends up institutionalised for being criminally insane. Four years later he is released in to the care of psychiatrist Dr Willard who wants to take Nick back to the scene of the crime. The two of them head off with the doctor’s students (including Matt Berry from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace) in tow.

The Devil's Chair film starts straight forward enough, Nick narrates the story and references the cliches of the genre, there is death and a secret journal, but then, with about 15 minutes to go, the movie swerves in to new territory to finish on a nasty, bloody, high note. The ending is good, but the journey there is much less exciting, and often it is quite annoying.