Enter writer-director-actor Jeremy Gardner with The Battery, a film that played to Fantasia Film Festival audiences, but is widely available for you to rent or purchase if you venture to iTunes. And I highly recommend you choose one of those two options.
The Battery is a buddy movie first, a road trip movie second and a zombie film last. It’s clever, honest and thoroughly engaging. While the scenario Gardner – along with producer/co-star Adam Cronheim – presents isn’t anything new, it’s the characters that help this micro-budget gem transcend the usual zombie fodder.
Ben and Mickey (Gardner and Cronheim, respectively) are two baseball players wandering the backroads of New England in the wake of a undead apocalypse. They’re on no real discernible journey – survival being their only real priority. Ben does the cooking and all of the zombie killing. Mickey keeps to himself, lost in the music spinning in his portable CD player. And we come to find they’re two amiable dudes. This warm balance of their – rather f’ed up – lives is interrupted when Mickey begins to communicate with a mysterious female survivor via some walkie talkies they salvaged. Naturally, a small rift builds between Ben and Mickey and things spiral out of control from there.
What I appreciate about The Battery is that character is everything. These are two guys I’d follow anywhere regardless of the scenario they’ve been thrust into. The subplot involving the mystery survivor and the equally mysterious camp she hails from is icing on the cake.
Gardner’s comedic beats work wonderfully (the Tremors bit gave me a chuckle) as do the dramatic stakes at play – especially with Mickey. My only real criticism of the film is that it could be tightened – lose a montage or two and especially lose some of the padding given to the film’s final 20 minutes for maximum impact. The Battery is a real discovery and one of my favorite genre films of the year so far.
K. King’s writing-directing debut played at a midnight show during Fantasia, an apropos time for a film of this flavor.
Zombie Hunter is ridiculous. I was amused at times, but for most of it I was sitting there wondering if everyone was in on the joke. I’d like to think so, but I’m not so sure. Regardless, the film is a silly mess oozing with neon-colored blood and dripping with sex appeal. It’s the type of film one would catch on USA’s Up All Night and turn off because you’d prefer to get some sleep or stick with because you’ve got two more beers in your six-pack to finish…and the movie’s getting better with every brew. But by the next morning you kind of regret the decision.
The scenario is simple: Martin Copping plays Hunter, a hard-ass who lost his family during a zombie uprising (instigated by a new drug that hit the streets), so he traverses the country in his muscle car killing zombies along the way. Copping’s voice over is – you guessed it – ridiculous, growling about “silence” and zombies and other nonsense. But then he meets a band of other survivors led by Danny Trejo’s Father Jesus. There’s also pervo teenager in the group along with some dude in a hat, some overweight dude and a pair of babes. I describe them with as much care as the script has given these characters. Through a series of events, they’re all ejected from their safe haven and thrown back on the road to fight zombies and other threats.
Anyway, it’s all stupid. The zombies are zombies (I did appreciate the one zombie extra that took time to throw guts at his prey) and the CG monsters are a shameless rip-off of the Lickers and the Tyrant from Resident Evil. King throws an tremendous amount of style at the film, which makes it visually fun and kudos to him for making it look cool on the budget he was working from. The pace zips along and there’s never really a dull moment. Still, it’s pretty dumb. I guess it’s really about the state of mind with which you go into this one. Seeing it with a crowd or at a party might help elevate the experience.
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