The Last Starship was originally released as Monsters. I’m pretty sure that switching the name like this is to try and outrun poor reviews. That should tell you something about what is to come.
The Last Starship is a mix of steampunk, zombie apocalypse, science fiction. What do you get when you blend all that together? Let’s just say if I wasn’t already drinking whiskey, I would have started. The movie was made in the UK, and while it was filmed in English, a lot of the dialogue feels like it was poorly translated.
I have to be honest, I could barely keep track of what was going on. There is a lot of weird dialogue.
The zombies were almost laughable:
The Last Startshp Zombie
As a zombie movie this scored a 0 out of 100.
As a movie it scored a 10/100.
It gets 10 points for being so horrible I kept watching for longer than I really wanted. It was just so bad I couldn’t look away.
Zombie Town is a low budget zombie movie, but that doesn’t mean its bad. The acting is actually pretty good and the special effects were better than I would have expected for a low budget film.
There was also plenty of gore and a decent level of violence, which is always appreciated, including the slug bursters:
Slug Burster
Yes, I think the special effects guy liked the movie aliens. The scenes where the bursters are coming out of the bodies totally took me back to the first Alien movie.
Zombie Town has some slow spots here and there, but it is also true to itself, which wins it a few points. I know some zombie purists beat this movie up because of the slugs being the origin of the zombies, but I honestly don’t know what the difference between a slug or some invisible germ being the root cause.
My personal favorite line is when Jake and Randy pull up to the old folks home and everyone is running out. Jake’s “This can’t be good line,” followed up by the decision to go in and see what’s happening is just perfect zombie movie logic.
Zombie Town scores a 65/100, putting it at the upper end of the Rainy Day Movie segment. Save it for a dreary day and enjoy.
Revelation Trail is a western, zombie crossover. The movie suffers from the “too much set up” and backstory. We came to see zombies eating people, we don’t really need a half hour of backstory on the main character. The first thirty minutes could have been condenses to just the scenes with zombies, and the narrator saying, “The dead have risen, and a preacher and his family are some of the first to suffer.”
Revelation Trail scored a 57/100. What cost it points? It is a little slow to start, and heavy on dialogue. The zombies are actually quite well done, but there is too much exposition and unnecessary character development between the zombie action scenes.
Revelation Trail is a good Rainy Day Movie. It has some slow spots, but there are also some decent action sequences.
Always make sure your gear is in working order before you need. Thankfully this looks like it was just target practice, although that barrel is now at the bottom of the ocean…
Survival of the Dead takes place on Plum Island in Delaware. We always go to Lewes and I’ve driven by Plum Island a thousand times, but never really paid attention to it, so it was interesting to see Plum Island play a central role in the movie. I also loved how the people (in the movie) who live on the island apparently have lived in a bubble that has kept them off the cost of Ireland? Loved the accents.
The first half an hour revolves around the survivors of a military unit making their way to Plum Island.
I kept watching, and couldn’t quite place the kid, then it struck me that the young guy, played by Devon Bostick, was the older brother from “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”.
On a side note, from everything I know, Plum Island is basically a sand bar, so if you plan on going there when the zombie apocalypse starts in real life, you might want to rethink that plan.
Survival of the Dead is an interesting movie. I was hoping that Romero would hearken back to Dawn of the Dead (1978) with hordes of the undead trying to get to the survivors. If that is what you were looking for, this might not be the movie for you.
Survival of the Dead is a low budget, decently acted zombie movie. At just four million to make, this is a “cheap” movie by Hollywood standards. Overall, Survival of the Dead earned itself a 73/100.
What cost it points? The first thing was the focus on the feud between the two families. The second thing was the lack of zombie hordes. There was a good bit of zombie violence, but it was mostly small scale stuff. Survival of the Dead is definitely Worth Your Time, it just could have been so much more.
Diary of the Dead is the fifth George Romero movie in the series. It takes a slightly different, first person look at the Zombie Apocalypse, through the eyes of a small group of college students who get caught up in the biting while they were trying to make a movie for college credit.
The movie starts off a bit slow. We are twenty minutes in before our students encounter their first zombie. The survivors are fleeing town in an RV when they encounter a state trooper. The driver panics and floors it, driving over several other “people”.
This segues into the next phase of the movie. The RV driver feels guilty, because she thinks she killed people, and tries to kill herself. Her friends then take her to the worst possible place to go during the Zombie Apocalypse, and drive her to the hospital.
The survivors now realize the apocalypse is really happening, but for some reason the cameraman thinks that staying behind to power his camera is a reasonable decision here.
There is a little too much focus on the “first person” filming aspect of the movie. It would have been better if the movie focused more on the zombie action and not so much on the interpersonal relationships between the survivors.
I have to be honest though, if this movie was made by anyone other than George Romera, I’d probably be slightly less critical. It’s just that the first person shooting style doesn’t really change the fact that there wasn’t good zombie action until forty or so minutes in.
I did like the bad *ss deaf Amish guy, and his exit was fairly epic.
Overall, Diary of the Dead is a Rainy Day Movie. It has some slow section, and some silly actions taken by the survivors, but if you save it for a dreary day its a good way to spend a hour and a half.
Diary of the Dead scored a 58/100. The things that cost it points were the slow start, lack of zombie hordes, and the first person camera stick wears thin after a while.