Reviews

A lot of ideas here and they are crushed into a single film.

The cyberpunk elements and dystopian vibe is way better than Hollywood has ever been able to capture in their big budget flicks.

Some John Carpenter pulse synth, a kind of 80's feel and some weird salvage tech that feels somehow familiar.

Most people wouldn't have enough cultural context to get a lot of this movie. It's too dense for most viewers nowadays.

I found it engaging and the visuals were convincing. The effects for the EMP burst and the exposition were really well done.

The acting was not cringe at all. Great characterization.

I am a big fan of 70's science fiction and this reminded me of the very best films from that era.

Millennials unable to cope with a cappuccino shortage take an hour and a half to decide to off themselves. If our ancestors gave up this easy we would not even be here. Kyra Sedgwick looked like she was praying for death for most of this film and surely had her agent buggy whipped for dragging her into this mess. The ending was one of those tragic tack-ons when they know it is likely to be unable to even get a Netflix deal so they try to give viewers something to smile about after watching this dreck.

This is a gritty, daunting film about hobos riding trains during the Great Depression. Ernest Borgnine is absolutely inspired as a psychopathic train conductor who is so fed up with bums hitching rides he takes pleasure in bopping them in the head and throwing them under the wheels. Borgnine was a brilliant actor who made one hell of a scary villain. His face is lit up with rage in every scene and it is obvious this guy went around the bend a long time ago. He's a solid chimney of murderous glee who refuses to let the vagrants win. The frightening thing about his persona is that many of us have known men like him in our lives - not bright but given authority they seem quite capable of using it as an excuse to kill people. The film slowly builds to a climax which of course culminates in a battle between the conductor and the Emperor of the North, which I knew Lee Marvin was going to win but was relieved when he chose not to kill anybody. Keith Carradine was the only disappointment, he was wooden as a mannequin and phoning in his performance. The other two leads were extremely fascinating characters and you were not quite sure who to root for in the end, Borgnine having a sort of logic in his outlook you started to sympathize with after the hobos managed to kill or seriously injure his crew.

Tries to fill out the run time with a lot of maudlin young adult angst, pretends to introduce twists but never really takes off. Story wanders around through several different genres, can't decide what kind of movie it wants to be and tosses in a couple action sequences to make the viewer think the plot must be going somewhere. It never does.

Unsatisfying conclusion that doesn't explain much but shows enough to let the viewer know he was just gypped out of 1.5 hours of life they can never get back.

The only saving grace of this film was Lawrence Fishburne, who as always, was superb and kept you hanging on his every word. I don't know how they got him for this movie but he was the only thing standing between it and complete irrelevance.

Style is everything and this low budget horror film doesn't have much of it.

The premise is interesting. A woman overdoses and awakens pregnant in a hospital underground. There are monsters and they're not a bad idea, just underused.

The acting, dialogue and pacing is sub-par. Could have been a good film with a little more effort. The director tries several different story angles and none of them works.

Never really got off the ground and ending was disappointing. Low budget is not an excuse to make bad films. See my review of "Southbound" for a low budget horror film that is excellent on a low budget.

Starts out plausibly enough with a lot of expensive CGI and convincing effects. Right away you begin to notice the acting is sort of flat and unconvincing like this was a rehearsal run-through for the film,

The next thing you know, one ridiculous set of behaviors which has no explanation is leading to another ridiculous reaction which makes these top notch "scientists" and "astronauts" look like passengers on a special needs bus to mars. At no time was the cast engaged, believable or doing anything with their roles but phoning it in.

I've watched a dozen super low budget films with abysmal production values this week and what they all had in common was that not one of them was as lousy or as disappointing as this latest car accident in a series of big blunders by Hollyweird.

Increasingly, you can predict which movies are going to really stink nowadays by their budgets. The bigger the budget the more likely the film will be completely unwatchable. That hollow gourd feeling hit me the first couple of minutes I was watching Batman VS Superman recently but here my stomach was sinking in seconds. It could not be more obvious that the entire film was just kind of heaved together and thrown into the cinemas. A random script generator robot could have produced something better than this.

Even if it is animated, the characterizations and dialogue are pretty good including the facial animation.

The tension builds slowly and spares some time for some exposition but it creates a very effective atmosphere of slowly growing paranoia and fear.

There are enough interesting twists to keep you engaged until the ending and the climax is pretty dark. Like most apocalyptic films it has a final decision that you didn't see coming.

This is the first animated zombie film I have ever seen so I have to rate it the best. Well worth watching.

Try harder.

This film required three more rewrites to whip it into shape. The script they went with was student project stuff. Anybody who knows the rudiments of cinema would know this story needed a lot of work and a lot of tightening up.

Music, lighting, acting, pacing, staging and direction was just flat out terrible.

The film has a great premise. With a talented director they could have made a cult classic. Unfortunately the movie starts to go into a tailspin in the first five minutes and is unable to pull out of it's plunge earthward. What could have been a tense Twilight Zone episode ends up a direct-to-video embarrassment.

As for the ending ... give me a break. This is not how you end any film. Reading the reviews up here has convinced me there are a lot of cast and crew writing them.

I knew within ten minutes of watching this movie it was truly going to crater into a heap of drivel. It is one of those films that you could see the director wasn't sure what he was doing when it started, got seriously lost midway and wandered off a cliff by the end.

Bad dialogue, bad script, bad acting, bad premise, bad pacing, bad delivery, boring development and incredibly bad production. The music sounded like it came from a better film that could be taken seriously.

Noah Taylor, an Australian actor with far too much screen credit to be in a turkey like this looked positively grateful to be disemboweled very early on. You could see his eyes smiling with glee as he was holding his own entrails because he knew he had just cashed his paycheck and would be seeing himself out of this disaster. Poor Charlotte Beaumont and other unfortunate actors had to endure upwards of another fifty minutes of career suicide.

The reason I am not posting any spoilers is that there is no way anyone could not figure out the plot of this film if they are out of diapers or have watched any cinema in the last century.

I could add more descriptive adjectives to the title but I ran out of room.

Every once in a while, a movie is made that isn't targeting anybody and is not cynically aiming for box office. Instead, it is just trying to be as good as it can possibly be on the budget it has to operate with.

I enjoyed Turbo Kid more than all the blockbuster superhero movies that came out in 2016. I enjoyed it more than all the post apocalyptic films that I have ever seen and all the genre films of the 80's in a similar vein. It somehow manages to combine an innocent childlike wonder with graphic shots of people being vaporized into bloody mist.

The two leads, Munro Chambers and Laurence Leboeuf, were incredibly good. Do you know how low budget films always have actors trying too hard? The sorts of people who think screaming can substitute for acting? These two were natural and charming in their roles and they did not appear to be straining at all. All the marvel comic films I saw over the summer had stilted, awkward dialogue by people phoning it in who sounded like they were reading off cereal boxes. These movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and the repartee in them that was supposed to be hip instead ended up just being annoying and tedious. Meanwhile these two actors you loved both of them the instant they were introduced and by the end you wished the film was another hour long because the two of them together were nothing but fun. If you say you didn't tear up at the end you are lying or else you were never young.

Every scene in the film is complemented by this unbelievable soundtrack by Le Matos which can only be described as some kind of wonderful retro dubstep Nintendo romantic electronica.

The most brilliant stroke was getting Michael Ironside for the villain. In the 80's you couldn't throw a pebble without it hitting Ironside playing a bad guy so he seemed to be the ultimate coup for the lead as the classic post-apocalyptic water baron.

I was so glad to hear they are bringing them both back for the sequel. The only reason I didn't give this a ten is because I am saving that review for the sequel when they have a bigger budget and hopefully exceed this cult masterpiece.

The prequel for this movie about Apple is up on YouTube, I highly recommend you see it to get a feel for the movie in advance. It shows what she was doing before she ran into The Kid.

One of the biggest challenges to movie makers is conveying the horror of nuclear war in post-atomic film. The reality is that shelter life isn't that glamorous if depicted realistically. The threats present aren't very dramatic and in most cases stealthy and lacking in suspense. The madness of nuclear war has to be communicated instead through contrivances, like atomic mutations or pervasive inescapable radiation like in ON THE BEACH. These things are not realistic but somehow they can often transmit the bleak and terrifying plight of the survivors.

CHOSEN SURVIVORS uses vampire bats to contrast with the serene tranquility of the expensive government shelter the characters take refuge in. No matter how safe they may think they will be, it turns out that the bats are determined to intrude in their sanitary environment and prey on them where they believed they were safe.

It's very effective for a low budget film. It is well acted and well directed and has an interesting score that complements the story. There are times you really feel claustrophobic and at the mercy of the bats who can penetrate even what they think are secure places.

The color scheme was pretty good considering it was accomplished before CGI filters existed for post-production and the special effects are pretty convincing as well. The somber blue shades over everything in the darkness combined with the lively shadows of the bats is very well done. The sequences of bats attacking is extremely well choreographed with the human actors.

This movie is a rare sci-fi gem with a bleak apocalyptic ending that is common for this genre of cinema but somehow satisfying. The movie stopped a little short of being a classic but is well worth viewing.

This is the reason I watch low budget horror. Ninety five percent of them are dreck and just about the time you get ready to swear off them forever, you discover a real gem like this one.

I am not sure how to classify the genre of this film. Lovecraftian Twilight Zone Retro Eighties Pastiche Circular Nightmare? It is incredible from the first minute to the very last. Some of the stories are not completely related to one another directly and others are part of an overall theme that indicated to me you never want to turn off on the ramp that leads to "Southbound."

There is real gore in parts but the best sequences are purely psychological horror and that part of it is unrelenting. There are elements of demonic influence that permeate the film and you get the sense they are behind most of what you see happening - the humans seem to keep falling into the traps they set for people.

I call this mandatory viewing for fans of good horror films.

Tangerine Dream soundtrack, as always, leaves the movie feeling dreamy and surreal.

One of the few films about secret alien bases and experiments that is watchable. The acting and dialogue is top notch. Keenan Wynn makes an appearance and is excellent as usual.

The film all feels like it takes place in a single night and into the following day. It blends together many different science fiction motifs fairly well and tries hard on a small budget to be convincing. It's nice to watch a movie that isn't dumbed down.

Seems to be a kind of holdout from the seventies psychedelic head flicks in some ways. It has that reformed hippie quality about it.

Excellent tasteful script combining several Lovecraft stories and the Miskatonic settings. My only complaint is that it should have been longer. Finally somebody does Lovecraft right. There have too many terrible adaptations of his work using names and places only but the director of this film knew what he was doing and respected the medium.

Strikes a note of quality from the beginning to the end as a series of dreamlike vignettes having to do with a strange horn the protagonist has seen. A weird otherworldly feel permeates every scene and the sense of terrific horror just out of sight plagues the main character.

These guys did a period piece on a very low budget that is nonetheless extremely convincing. The cars, dress and settings looked early 1920's and it was obviously not all done with CGI. This crew should be proud of making such a superb film on a low budget.

I dreamed of interrupting this movie halfway through and gouging my eyes out with a fork. That which is seen, cannot be unseen. I always had this sneaky feeling that INDEPENDENCE DAY was really crudely scripted and directed ... this movie confirmed it for me. The director can't direct. The final product is a confusing mish-mash of E.T., POLTERGEIST and about fifty other films the premises were ripped off from. I can't understand the other reviews calling this movie original because everything in it was derivative. It is as if the script review called for every single popular film of the past ten years to contribute some elements to the story.

Terrible. Really lousy. Shameful. I would have recommended this director never work again but he made one of the biggest financial blockbusters of all time. That movie was even worse than I remember, in hindsight after watching this turkey.

Another poster called it the Citizen Kane of zombie movies. They were right. It's got some magic in it.

If you heard the premise you'd judge this film in advance and in doing so you'd be missing a real horror classic. There's something about it that follows you out of the end. It's scored in a very interesting way, shot in a very interesting way and the whole thing has a dreamlike quality. Scott Grimes was superb in the lead.

The very last bit really makes the film. Clever. The whole thing is well written. The dialogue is not hackneyed or trite, it's literate.

Watching it I thought the director must have been really hungry because he spun this simple story into something gold.

There are so many bad horror films made now by amateurs on similar budgets it would be easy to mistake this for more low rent shlock. In fact, it is a brilliant tour de force in the macabre from the first frame to the last creepy word.

David Caruso is excellent in this as the conscience of the piece (no spoilers) and the other actors are very convincing and natural. You won't know what is really happening until the very end and the director guides the whole picture swiftly to a truly memorable ending.

I hate films with gore in them and love eerie psychological flicks with undertones of the supernatural. The best of them leaves you wondering if any of it was real outside of the protagonists mind. This is a film like that and it sticks with you longer afterwards.

DO IT, GORDON. This movie will raise the hair on the back of your neck, guaranteed. Is it a ghost film? Fortean classic of the macabre? Brilliant psychological horror? All three at the same time and a little more.