Reviews

Yup... another sea creature, oil rig, military tries to deal with creature hamfistedly type straight to video affair. But if you like movies about huge electric eels resembling the creature on the cover of Asia's first album... than this is for you. Especially if you're holding a David Keith film festival. Plenty of drama and tension to be had but the cheap cg sea creatures (say that 5 times fast) are too hokey to provide payoff or menace. Not the worst thing out there for sure but it's nothing you haven't seen already in the last 15-20 years: The Abyss, Deep Star Six, Leviathan etc. etc. All that's really missing is a lesser Baldwin brother.

A great flick. Certainly it has its roots in such films as Omega Man, Dawn of the Dead (esp. + NOTLD & DofD), The Last Man on Earth etc. But I dare you to do a zombie movie without referencing, intentionally or otherwise, those seminal pieces. It seems to have been produced on a less-than-Hollywood size budget and that works very well for it. It's a little more personally involving that way instead of assaulting you with constant pullbacks, zoom-outs and flash cuts to reveal everything that could possibly blow up... being blown up. Another plus: The drama is not solely derived from the evasion by our heroes and heroines of the infected "zombies." The film is richer and arguably darker for making the clever decision to reveal the most threatening villain in the second half of the film to be just plain old uninfected humans... not the zombies after all. Can you trust the human next to you to kill you? Can you trust him to keep you alive? Are you better off amongst the bent-on-destruction, one-track-mind zombies or in claustrophobic quarters with uninfected humans of uncertain morals and questionable ethics? There is room for many stories based on this film's basic premise... all manner of confrontations with the dead and alive can be created here. Luckily for us, Danny Boyle focused on some of the most intriguing tales to share with us. I hope his future work is balanced out with more material of a horrific, dark nature.

This is it. This is ground zero. This is what led to Gone With The Wind, The Godfather, Star Wars and Titanic. You could arguably call it the first successful action movie. No idea what the gross was or what the overseas receipts were but certainly many a coin was spent by early film patrons to witness the most basic of human acts... the instinctual expulsion of invading micro-particles for the maintenance of Fred Ott's health. But, did Fred Ott fake it? Was he truly the first stunt man? No matter, its brevity and succinctness are exemplary to this day. It is better than some 3 hour epics in today's multiplexes.