Nice idea. Movie: One long execution.

Rating: 2/10 (8 September 2007)

Great location shooting -- a windswept old model town, right out of a Twilight Zone episode, that was used as an atomic testing site. I love it when naive characters wander around in a deserted little settlement, discovering the mannequins and other left-overs from the era of atomic testing. There's a certain thrill in it all, which might be called "the last people on earth" arousal jag. The New Mexico desert is tinted a delicate yellow and is thoroughly windswept, inviting exploration. As a kid I spent a summer along with a handful of Coast Guardsmen at the closed Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The entire fort had been closed down and left exactly as it was except no locks on anything, like an empty movie set -- the mile long lines of barracks, the administration buildings, the hospital (with stained slides still lined up neatly on the shelves). It made your hair stand on end to wander at will through a community that was completely silent and empty. (Of course, now, anybody can do it by walking through downtown Los Angeles on a weekend.) I stumbled across a heap of discarded, live 20 millimeter cannon shells and, not realizing that live ammo of such age might be unstable, began juggling the things like a circus performer. That's kind of the story of this movie except the ammo assumes explosive human form. Five or six people in their trailer-towing van have a flat tire and wind up looking through the phony community they've discovered. It's an involving experience until the mutated zombies show up and then it turns into an unusually gory and revolting slash fest.
What a wasted opportunity. What could have been a great Twilight Zone story becomes just another movie with angry, made-up, el freakos, trapping and killing half the visitors in the most repugnant fashion and the survivors retaliating in kind. The camera lingers with relish on one of the deformed creeps (they all look different except for their bad teeth) who has just had a wooden stake thrust into his belly. To the accompaniment of a sound like a glue pot, the creature looks down at the protruding handle, says, "Huh?", and then pulls it out with what I think was intended to be an evil smile. You see, in order to really KILL the things, you have to do some REAL damage -- whack them through the head with an ax, jump off a cliff with them, blow them to smithereens in an explosion. The killings are not only an insult to the human body but to the human intelligence as well. (The escapees are literally drenched in blood by the end.) And yet that's what the movie is ABOUT.
There's no attempt to reach the audience above the abdominal level. It has nothing to say about atomic bombs or the wonder of the exotic. It might as well be taking place with half a dozen kids trapped in a mausoleum full of ghouls, a variation on a theme that was old a long time ago, only this time around the special effects are excruciating.
Of course it's always nice to see Kathleen Quinlan, but the acting here consists almost entirely of screams. And the young men, who ought to be able to take care of themselves, are incredibly stupid. One of them is being chased through the desert by a mutant who is equally light of foot. The kid is armed with an automatic. As he sprints and stumbles along he points the pistol behind him and fires wildly without looking until he empties his weapon. The viewer's heart races alarmingly.
Maybe you'll enjoy seeing zombies/ghouls/rotting corpses/mutants slaughtering innocent people in the bloodiest way imaginable. It wasn't my kind of film. I thought it sucked. But -- if I can end on a constructive note -- for anyone who wants to see an ax murderer at work, almost equally bloody but amounting to far more than an upper-torso exercise, they might try "The Weight of Water." If you don't like challenges, of course, then skip it.