Thursday, November 24, 2011

Rise of the Undead (2005)

This was difficult to get through. There is bad cgi before the credits start, and an hour into the film there is a revelation that would have been creative in the 1970s, but now is such a cliche that you'll wish you'd never wasted your time on this.

A group of strangers end up in a nearby building trying to escape multiple fireballs and explosions that are rocking the city.  Personally I'd want to get out of an exploding, flaming city, but oh well.  They run into Jay who provides exposition regarding bio warfare (which doesn't explain the exploding buildings) and advises that the safest thing to do is to head to an underground military base two miles away.

Apparently the bio warfare turns people into zombies that pop out from dark rooms and hallways.  The problem about watching a fight for survival in a dark room is that you can't tell what is going on, nor can you tell the zombies from the humans. It's even more confusing when the darkened fight all of a sudden switches to brightly lit footage of feet running by the camera.  Huh?

As the zombies mount further attacks, the number of survivors dwindle until there is only one left.  And this is when you'll rue the day you decided to watch this, as all of a sudden the lone survivor wakes up.  That's right, wakes the fuck up.  It was all a dream.  Everyone is still alive.  In another annoying plot point, two of the strongest characters decide to give up trying to survive,  even though it hasn't even been a day.

That leaves us with some sort of cgi energy creature that exists only within the dark and is in the building.  Luckily the group manages to produce a camera from thin air and use the flash to ward off this dark energy creature. Hurrah... no wait, I hate them all and want them dead.

The dialogue is often a lower volume than the sound effects and music.  There is a super long boring story told by a bad actor about his grandmother's spider monkey.  One scene is shot from the same camera angle with characters in different positions. Consequently it appears as if the characters teleport back and forth to different positions during the scene, which is stupid rather than artistic.  Lastly, at one point, one of the characters says "Does it really matter what it is or why it's happening?"  Yes, yes it does.

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