[Review] Movie Night, Episode 15!
And the moral of today's review is, don't buy horror movies from the Pound Shop unless you REALLY don't mind taking your chances...
This is what I get, as I say, for picking things up off the DVD shelf at the Pound Shop purely out of morbid curiosity. Museum of the Dead (rebadged on my copy as Zombie Attack, which while technically an accurate description really isn't an improvement on the original) is genuinely terrible.
I'll go ahead right now and say that it's not as relentlessly cringeworthy as some. This movie can at least manage basic things like continuity of main characters' outfits from one scene to another, and I've watched films that couldn't. It even starts out with quite a fun premise: two girls looking for something to do on Hallowe'en decide to go to the "Museum of the Dead", an exhibition of (mostly pre-Columbian Mesoamerican) ancient artefacts that only opens to the public on that one night of the year. Unfortunately, the centrepiece of the exhibition is the skull of the cannibal warrior Tolec, whose restless spirit is up, about, and apparently still hungry. From there it all goes downhill fast.
And if it'd gone downhill in the guts-gore-suspense-and-screaming way, that could've potentially been a great movie. Unfortunately the actual plot would only fill about half an hour even if it was coherently explained (there's some bizarre shenanigans with a heroic thief who's trying to steal Tolec's skull, his camera-carrying buddy who he obviously has backstory with that we never actually find out about, and the owner of the museum having orchestrated all this so that Tolec can kill people and take their souls - what?) and the film runs nearer to ninety minutes. The space is filled up by endless sequences of the characters running through mazelike corridors (well, corridor - they obviously only have one which they're just shooting from opposite ends to get variety) to get away from what we assume to be side-effects of the curse of Tolec, in the form of some of THE WORST zombies I've ever seen. It only gets more bizarre when we discover that at least one of the zombies knows kung-fu - credit to that guy, to be fair, I never thought I would see someone try to do a kip-up while still trying to maintain a zombie shamble and it was a genuinely valiant attempt. The mad mixed martial arts continue as the heroine, a gorgeous Puerto Rican girl called Jewel (played by one Tanya Vidal, who is apparently so embarrassed about this movie that she doesn't list it on her IMDB filmography), tests out her kickboxing skills on the shambling dead and holds her own rather better than two armed cops end up doing - really, guys, in this day and age who doesn't know that you have to aim for the head?! It's reached the point where people not doing that in any modern-setting zombie movie actually damages my suspension of disbelief because FFS, that's about on a cultural par with a character not knowing that CTRL-ALT-DEL reboots a Windows box...
But anyway, yes. The plot shuffles on, as do the zombies, in a meandering and basically tedious ramble through the same four sets on loop, until eventually we get to a very unsatisfying denouement featuring one of the most boring fight sequences I've ever seen and some sort of completely ???-inducing "twist" ending. About the only person who seems to have had any kind of genuine creative inspiration at all is the guy who did the special effects, who came up with a kind of cool-looking Photoshop-filter scratchy deal that's used mostly on Tolec but also in the main titles and a few other places. This does look pretty nifty in an arty sort of way, and it's nice to have coherent visual distortion effects that actually give some sense of thematic continuity, but the downer is that this particular effect is blatantly being mostly used to cover up the fact that they didn't have the budget to do proper gore scenes - so they just scratchy-filter out all the most violent bits, so you can't see that nobody is in fact getting stabbed at all. While I'm not particularly a fan of splatter per se, I do think that if you're going to go down the pointy-things-and-strawberry-sauce route, at least, y'know, do it with feeling. If the makers of Bad Taste could do what they did on a budget of NZD 30K, nobody else has any excuse.
So yes, this movie is basically awful, but I have seen worse. Slow, boring, and not in any way clever, but a few people involved were obviously making a brave attempt to save the damned thing so I'm going to honour their efforts with a 2/5. Skip this unless you really haven't got anything better to do.
Laters,
Rath
This is what I get, as I say, for picking things up off the DVD shelf at the Pound Shop purely out of morbid curiosity. Museum of the Dead (rebadged on my copy as Zombie Attack, which while technically an accurate description really isn't an improvement on the original) is genuinely terrible.
I'll go ahead right now and say that it's not as relentlessly cringeworthy as some. This movie can at least manage basic things like continuity of main characters' outfits from one scene to another, and I've watched films that couldn't. It even starts out with quite a fun premise: two girls looking for something to do on Hallowe'en decide to go to the "Museum of the Dead", an exhibition of (mostly pre-Columbian Mesoamerican) ancient artefacts that only opens to the public on that one night of the year. Unfortunately, the centrepiece of the exhibition is the skull of the cannibal warrior Tolec, whose restless spirit is up, about, and apparently still hungry. From there it all goes downhill fast.
And if it'd gone downhill in the guts-gore-suspense-and-screaming way, that could've potentially been a great movie. Unfortunately the actual plot would only fill about half an hour even if it was coherently explained (there's some bizarre shenanigans with a heroic thief who's trying to steal Tolec's skull, his camera-carrying buddy who he obviously has backstory with that we never actually find out about, and the owner of the museum having orchestrated all this so that Tolec can kill people and take their souls - what?) and the film runs nearer to ninety minutes. The space is filled up by endless sequences of the characters running through mazelike corridors (well, corridor - they obviously only have one which they're just shooting from opposite ends to get variety) to get away from what we assume to be side-effects of the curse of Tolec, in the form of some of THE WORST zombies I've ever seen. It only gets more bizarre when we discover that at least one of the zombies knows kung-fu - credit to that guy, to be fair, I never thought I would see someone try to do a kip-up while still trying to maintain a zombie shamble and it was a genuinely valiant attempt. The mad mixed martial arts continue as the heroine, a gorgeous Puerto Rican girl called Jewel (played by one Tanya Vidal, who is apparently so embarrassed about this movie that she doesn't list it on her IMDB filmography), tests out her kickboxing skills on the shambling dead and holds her own rather better than two armed cops end up doing - really, guys, in this day and age who doesn't know that you have to aim for the head?! It's reached the point where people not doing that in any modern-setting zombie movie actually damages my suspension of disbelief because FFS, that's about on a cultural par with a character not knowing that CTRL-ALT-DEL reboots a Windows box...
But anyway, yes. The plot shuffles on, as do the zombies, in a meandering and basically tedious ramble through the same four sets on loop, until eventually we get to a very unsatisfying denouement featuring one of the most boring fight sequences I've ever seen and some sort of completely ???-inducing "twist" ending. About the only person who seems to have had any kind of genuine creative inspiration at all is the guy who did the special effects, who came up with a kind of cool-looking Photoshop-filter scratchy deal that's used mostly on Tolec but also in the main titles and a few other places. This does look pretty nifty in an arty sort of way, and it's nice to have coherent visual distortion effects that actually give some sense of thematic continuity, but the downer is that this particular effect is blatantly being mostly used to cover up the fact that they didn't have the budget to do proper gore scenes - so they just scratchy-filter out all the most violent bits, so you can't see that nobody is in fact getting stabbed at all. While I'm not particularly a fan of splatter per se, I do think that if you're going to go down the pointy-things-and-strawberry-sauce route, at least, y'know, do it with feeling. If the makers of Bad Taste could do what they did on a budget of NZD 30K, nobody else has any excuse.
So yes, this movie is basically awful, but I have seen worse. Slow, boring, and not in any way clever, but a few people involved were obviously making a brave attempt to save the damned thing so I'm going to honour their efforts with a 2/5. Skip this unless you really haven't got anything better to do.
Laters,
Rath