Review

Chris, Jackie, and Scott are your typical high school buddies, who naturally aren't members of the cool kid crowd and who therefore attract the attention of the school bully. They can hold their own however and are headed out of their small burg to the bright lights of Glover City to catch a band at some seedy bar, while about everyone else is heading for a night in a secluded farm house drinking and having sex and playing pin the tail on the donkey or something. Hey I never went to the cool parties either. Chris notes there's not a lot of traffic on the highway to Glover, how strange considering its peak hour.

Our three amigos duly arrive at the bar to find the streets deserted and worse yet no band playing. It's not long before they attracted the attention of a horde of zombies and are forced to barricade themselves in the bar. Meanwhile back home the zombie infection has spread with a few unwanted gatecrashers arriving at the cool party for a bite to eat. Our three desperadoes battle their way home, save Chris's girl, and then seek sanctuary at the High School. Clearly they aren't on the fast track to Harvard. More running and chasing and the like and then "To be continued ..." pops up the screen just to ensure you don't have any happy feelings. Bloody-Disgusting deserve a punch in the mouth for being quote whores this movie, frack you people!

Picking up the baton for the zombie weekend I manfully attacked the indie feature Zombie Transfusion aka Automaton Transfusion. Really wish I hadn't as the only people who are saying this one is half decent are people who got free screeners or who know the movie makers. Surprisingly even for the Yanks this one was cheap and it really shows with low contrast film stock, acting that can charitably only be called third rate, a plot with more holes in it than a shotgun blast victim, and a tendency to rely on gore to find the "stop at car wreck site" audience. Just because you have a camera and have scrounged some dollars off your family and friends doesn't mean you should go and make a movie folks, particularly if you have zero in the talent department.

Every second wannabee film maker is doing a zombie flick currently, problem is most of them ar woefully inept

The movie is clearly shot with those cameras that allow anyone to make a movie. You know the sort, go buy them in a department store in the consumer electronics section. Hell you can make a movie using a Canon DSLR if you really feel the need. What these cheap, in terms of movie equipment, cameras fail to do is give you any control over your sets, locations, or filming. Clearly Director Miller didn't have even the basic knowledge to shot a movie, the lightening for example is atrocious and well below anything you would consider in a professional movie. So don't expect anything even approaching The Asylum level of skill, decent setups, or simply a basic movie, Miller doesn't know what he's doing with the toys that no doubt his parents brought him. But hell it's just a zombie movie, and apparently fans of the shambling dead will watch any old rubbish!

It used to be that you could dial into a cheap horror flick and run across an Actor on their way to fame and fortune in tinsel town. Think Kevin Bacon sporting a boner in Friday the 13th or Meg Ryan of all people playing the bad girl in The Amityville Horror Part 3, there's numerous examples of young Actors striving through the dark genre. But with the number of direct to DVD poorly made flicks infesting our stores currently the Acting chops have disappeared down the toilet. It's actually painful watching some of the attempts in this flick, simply play the stereotype cardboard cut out seemed to be the order of the day. Emoting is down to melodrama, even by the standards of these poverty row flicks the thespians, word used loosely, on display here would be hard pressed to play a child's party successfully. Don't give up your day job at Maccas people, the crew needs you and Hollywood aren't coming a knocking anytime soon.

While the plot pretty much follows a sort of Romero line, group of survivors trying to keep one step ahead of the zombie horde, it's just plagued by plot issues. Why on earth would you hang around, let alone get out of the car, in a deserted city where clearly something has gone down? Why exactly would you view the local High School as some sort of sanctuary from the madness, there's no indication it's a survivor haven? And oh I don't know, zombie mayhem going down, sure I would head to the morgue as the soonest possibility, going to be no danger there right? As expected characters do dumb things, but we're talking a particular fine selection of idiots here that pretty much deserved to be culled.

Naturally being a zombie movie the gore is on the high side of the deck, though nowhere near Romero's full on assault on audience sensibilities. Enough is thrown on to keep the gorehounds appeased but its tame in comparison to where some movies in the subgenre have ventured. I got the feeling Director Miller was going through the motions rather than playing for keeps. While I'm not a fan of gorenography, this movie simply throws some blood at the screen and then hopes the audience will focus on that rather than the dodgy effects and less than impressive zombie rampage. It's like your local bible bashers got infected and were too polite to leave gore on the napkins, ultimately you are left wondering why Miller bothered.

Sweet up to review length! Okay the movie pissed me off like a last minute penalty beating my team, "To be continued..", WTF!!! Apparently a trilogy is planned because misery likes company or something similar. Quite frankly I've seen this movie I ain't coming back for a sequel. I note Vendetta didn't include on the cover anything about the movie simply finishing mid scene! So yeah last nail in the coffin time, if it showed signs of life I'd shot it in the head to put it out of its misery.

Clearly I'm not going to recommend this one to anyone except Wallaby supporters. A cheaply made Indie zombie flick by people with no talent. Save yourself some anger management classes and give this flick a wide birth. One for those flicks you might stumble upon it in the buy five movies for $10 bin, and even at that price you are being ripped off.