Well I
watched another low budget zombie movie. Is this one of them that I’ll regret
spending my time on or did I find another gem in the rough? It was a bit of
both I think…
The movie
opens up with a feller in the country who gets abducted by aliens. Then things
switch to a diner where the sheriff is about to go fishing with his buddy from
the military. While they are fishing we meet more people who are “introduced”
to some zombies who eat them! Zombies begat more zombies until the sheriff gets
a call about all hell breaking loose and heads back to town. All while this is
going on the people at the diner get trapped by the zombies. Well except for
the waitresses who make a break for it. Did I mention that the truck runs out
of gas? Eventually our characters discover that the zombies are being used by
Aliens who are invading the Earth. The filmmakers worked a Plan 9 nod into the
proceedings which is sort of cool I guess.
I thought
for sure that I had made a terrible mistake. This had been sitting in my Amazon
Prime queue for a while before I finally hit play. The movie starts off with a
concession stand ad and then the old restricted rating system animation with
the black cat. When the movie actually begins it has all these digitally
created “defects” as if it was on old film that was scratched up and damaged.
New movies have no business trying to pretend they are old drive-in flicks. It
never works and comes off as a dumb and desperate move on the part of the
filmmakers. I was ready to be miserable and then a funny thing happened, the
movie got good.
About
twenty minutes in I started to notice that the zombies looked decent. There
seemed to be time taken in designing each individual undead and shows someone
was taking their time and trying. This is also a “juicy” movie that doesn’t
skimp out on the red stuff. And I’m not talking that crappy CGI blood effects
but honest to God fake blood splattering all over the cast! There are a couple
of decent bites that are again practical effects work with latex tearing on
screen. Hell, other than the spaceships, which are awful CGI, most everything
was done old school. I can appreciate that, especially when the movie is such a
low budget affair.
After a
slow start the plot picks up and we get plenty of action. Characters die, some
in horrible ways, and more of the invasion plot is explained. Other than one
absurd sequence where a guy goes from normal newlywed to feeding people to his
zombie wife in like twenty minutes I found the movie to make some sense. Believe
it or not you can make your zombie alien invasion movie so silly that it takes
the audience out of the story you are telling, but here that doesn’t happen. By
the end I was rooting for the characters, which makes how things resolve a
giant kick in the butt!
A Zombie
Invasion isn’t a classic. It is an example of why I never shut a movie off no
matter how bad it is. Occasionally they start off slow and end up being fun.
This is one of those flicks. I’d say give it a chance. There are much worse out
there… trust me on that.
© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer
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