Movies Seen Recently: Monster Madness: Mutants, Space Invaders and Drive-Ins, SheBorg, Dead Rising: Watchtower

Monster Madness: Mutants, Space Invaders and Drive-Ins (2014) – A mediocre-to-fair documentary about the development of the drive-in movie from the boost that sci-fi got in the ’50s and the contemporary social trends that show up in the movies. Mostly an excuse to show trailers (often from very low-resolution sources), although there are also a few convention clips of actors such as Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Anne Francis (Forbidden Planet) reciting behind-the-scenes stories.

Mostly something to have on in the background, which is what I did.

SheBorg (2016) – This is the kind of indie sci-fi/horror flick that the camcorder auteurs of the ’80s wished they had had the technology to make. A malicious and psychotic female cyborg escapes from her extraterrestrial captors and crashlands in England, where the rebellious daughter of the local mayor and various friends end up having to save the earth from the SheBorg’s assimilation and enslavement of the locals.  Features good camera work (including a lot of subtle digital edits that you don’t realize were there until you see the outtakes in the credits), buckets of blood and alien green slime, and enough budget to wreck at least one car. Recommended.

Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015) – Usually, stories about the onset of a standard zombie apocalypse have one of two problems. Either:

• – we, the viewers, have to sit through the uninitiated ensemble cast discovering all of the standard tropes (“What are those things?!” “Oh, you have to shoot them in the head!” etc.), or
• – there’s at least one character who knows exactly what to do because of immersion in zombie movies and games, which leads the whole thing to become very meta while usually being not nearly as clever as it needs to be to pull it off.

This movie pulls off a third way: The zombie outbreak in question here is one of several in recent years, so while this is a localized ground-up zombie apocalypse, everyone knows what to do without citing The Book of Romero.

And because zombie movies are most interesting when they’re not all about the zombies, we’ve got some ruminations on click-bait news culture, government bureaucracy, and of course, EE-vil military conspiracies.  (Thrill to character actor Dennis Haysbert as an army general at a press conference — you just keep expecting him to reassure the populace that “you’re in good hands.”)

More impressive is the fact that, even though this is based on a video game, it’s still an enjoyable movie, with only a couple of brief first-person-shooter POV shots to hearken back to its origins.  (Compare that to the Resident Evil movies, which for me were like watching someone else play a videogame for two hours.)

Abandoned movies: You’re Jinxed Friend, You’ve Met Sacramento.