Bridge of the Doomed (2022)

What do they say about doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results? Well, I decided it was time to check out another low budget zombie movie in the hopes that it was going to be good. Want to guess how that turned out?

The movie starts with some soldiers guarding something when zombies attack them. They aren’t necessarily surprised by this so I’m guessing the outbreak has already happened. They shoot a bunch of zombies and then we see a general in a tent yelling about stuff. He wants the National Guard to send reinforcements, but they are out of gas. Being out of gas is something that keeps coming up in this movie. Until that it they need to drive away and then it is all cool… But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Then we see some civilians fight zombies and die. Why? I guess they needed to pad out the runtime. Then there are some generic news broadcasts in front of a greenscreen. Here I thought they would give us some details on what happened and how the world is dealing with it. Instead we get one talking head after another telling everyone to stay home. I’m not kidding it is like the same dialogue from five or six different actors. Well, that didn’t help things at all. Though we do finally get some idea what the story is supposed to be about when a small group of soldiers are sent to guard a bridge. There is a large group of zombies that will overrun the camp if they can’t keep them from crossing. Because that tiny ass creek is going to stop them.

It was at this point I realized the “screenwriter” had basically played a lot of first person shooters with zombie mods. Instead of scenes moving the story along we get stages where the characters have to shoot zombies before getting eaten. This idea is furthered by the monster or maybe super zombie that keeps picking them off. What is it? Why is it there? Is it intelligent? Who cares it is just there to be the boss fight. Most of our characters are killed off, but then despite the IMDB page they really aren’t given names much less backstories so who really cares. Eventually the National Guard shows up to reinforce the bridge and saves the survivors.

Here we go with the "boss" fight...

If you aren’t sure of it yet I hated this movie. The story is complete garbage and is paper thin. As I’ve already mentioned it feels more like stages in a game rather than a script with characters and plot. Nothing much happens here except for some zombies show up and get shot repeat until we get to a feature length and send it off to the internet for streaming. I can deal with incompetent filmmaking and lord knows I’ve seen a lot of it in my years of watching independent movies. But lazy filmmaking is just a bridge too far… heh see what I did there? That line is far more clever than anything in this damn piece of cinematic trash.

In case you were wondering the zombies are generic, the movie is filled with CGI bullet hits and blood. The cast is phoning it in, including Michael Pare who shows up for a hot minute to collect a paycheck. The pacing is awful with character introduced solely to be eaten by zombies, in most cases not even being given names before that happens. Honesty if you want to watch something this pointless I can direct you to some YouTube channels that stream games with zombie mods. At least the stream of profanity from the middle school kids is slightly entertaining which is more than I can say about Bridge of the Doomed.

It is here that I normally swear off watching low budget zombie movies that my various streaming services (here it was Amazon Prime) recommend to me. But I think we all know that I will eventually watch another one and be pissed off by it. Honestly would it kill the filmmakers out there to at least put the tiniest amount of effort into writing a script before heading into the woods to shoot your “masterpiece”? Stay far away from this turkey.

 

© Copyright 2023 John Shatzer