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Redcon-1 (2018)
Absolutely awful and a waste of time.
I'm a huge horror fan, I absolutely love zombie films and hailing from the UK I was hopeful this would stand out from the recent dross of third-rate horror films that have inexplicably found funding, but unfortunately this is the worst of them.
Full disclosure - I haven't watched the whole film. I could only sit through 26 minutes of this (on Netflix) before switching it off. But that in itself speaks volumes. I actually don't mind watching bad films, especially when they fall into the category of 'so bad they're good,' so in my 40 years on this planet there have been only a handful of films that couldn't hold my attention to the end and I'm rather disappointed that Redcon-1 is now at the top of that list.
So what's actually wrong with it?
The acting is just poor. The cast appears to be made up of actors whose biggest roles were as extras on Holby City. Not a single one of them is worthy of an honourable mention. The script they have to work with is also contrived and full of clichés. Entirely uninspiring and unoriginal.
The fighting is over-the-top and almost every gun fight turns into a melee with knives, sledgehammers or superfluous martial arts resulting in everyone getting drenched in blood but no one getting infected (despite it being made very clear that the virus is blood-borne).
The direction isn't terrible but it's not going to win any awards either. Even within the first 26 minutes there's simply too much happening on screen at any one time and too little time spent on any one character to relate to them. This left me with a few unanswered questions, chief among them being 'why are there US marines in London?' and 'why are some of the zombies just crazed maniacs while others seem to be carrying on with their lives as normal, snorting coke and watching TV?'
The editing is too fast which is usually a sign that it's trying to cover something up. In this case it's the lackluster fighting, expressionless acting and poor camera work. Speaking of the camera work - they appear to have used several different types of camera and forgot to colour grade the footage to match. It's possible that this was intentional, but as it doesn't add anything I'm going to say they just forgot. The end result is a mess.
All in all this is the worst film I have seen in years and the one small consolation I have is that I didn't pay to see it. Ignore any reviews that give this film more than three stars (which I would consider to be the absolute maximum) as these are from people who were involved in the production (at least some of them are honest about it).
Stormageddon (2015)
Just another generic sci-fi B-movie
I quite liked the premise of this film - but that's because it's basically The Terminator with a storm thrown in for good measure. The US has created an artificial intelligence called Echelon which becomes self-aware and turns on its creators. Our only hope is in a clinically inept woman and her robot buddy who are following a series of cryptic clues to stopping Echelon left to her in a VHS tape by her dead father, one of the creators of Echelon. Our bungling heroes are doggedly pursued by evil Echelon robots and psychotic government agents, neither of which are fully explained due to formulaic, lacklustre writing. The murder of the girl's father, Echelon's ability to manipulate the weather, the sudden appearance of the VHS tape at just the right moment and the father's use of cryptic clues to lead his daughter to the 'kill switch' instead of just telling her straight up on the tape could also have used some explanation.
Despite a relatively promising story, the film is let down by a terrible cast of Z-list TV actors and a director with a background in mannequin restoration. Sometimes it's possible to salvage a bad film with good editing, but the editor here had very little to work with and with this being his first film was completely out of his depth.
The CGI is also terrible. I've come to expect bad CGI in low budget films from 10 years ago, but this film is less than two years old. It seems anyone with even a little experience in Cinema 4D and After Effects thinks they can start their own visual effects company and make feature length films. If only it was as easy as that.
This is a prime example of a low budget film where no-one in the production was prepared to give 100% or even lift a finger if they weren't paid extra for it. Everything about this film is cheap and formulaic. If you've seen one SyFy film, you've seen them all and there's certainly nothing about this one that makes it stand out from any of the others.