Director: Matt Mitchell
Year: 2017
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
With the war over, a team of NATO scientists tries to navigate their way through an underground military bunker where a series of deformed beings created as a result of a hastily contrived experiment are left inside, forcing the team to find a way of getting out alive without being killed.
Review:
This was a somewhat disappointing, if still intriguing enough, take on the genre. One of the better factors within here comes from the solid and overall workable setup that allows the team to become immersed in this situation. Focusing on the historical perspective of the team trying to find out the a means helping to win the arms race at hand within the rest of the world and finding that their experiments have created a series of deformed, mutated beings that now run rampant across the facility and force them into a race to get out before they’re left for dead with the remnants of their experiments, it all get quite likable for what it is. This makes the various attempts at explaining the creatures feel genuine, while also managing to feature the necessary background motivations in the form of flashbacks to outside the trials of their experiments, so that everything here is enough to get this going.
That also serves as an important means of introducing the constant stream of creature encounters as the survivors try to make their way through the building to escape. Met with a constant array of deformed, grotesque zombie-like beings that are quite effective at evoking that sense of mutated genetic specimen that the whole thing is based on, there’s a nice mixture of confrontations at play that allow hard-hitting martial arts battles or other forms of armed combat against the creatures as they make their way through the darkened corridors of the facility. The more they navigate their way through it, the more it starts to lean into more overt exoteric and occult leanings that provide this with a darker tone than expected, and with the solid effects-work here for the creatures alongside the solid enough action, give this some worthwhile features.
The film does have some issues that keep it down. The biggest issue here is that, for as great a plot as it has, this one is incredibly repetitive and doesn’t distinguish itself once the central setup has been established. It’s a repetitive pattern of getting them into a corridor, encountering a strange beast they have to overcome, and then delivering info dumps about the occult ramifications of what they’ve done. The constant action of everything is solid enough, but the idea of the creatures being threats is laughably handled, with the inept encounters being quite cheap and flimsy, highlighting the repetitive nature even more when it reverts to the same thing over and over again. Even the flashbacks to the military team testing her with various torture tactics to get the information out are quite underwhelming, with the common variety style treatment doled out by the team and her being forced to remember what happened without much changing things along, which just creates more of a repetitive nature here with these bringing out the overlong running time that, alongside the cheesy low-budget origins, are what bring this down.
Overview: **.5/5
A disappointing, if still watchable, genre effort, this is a rather frustrating effort that has enough to be worthwhile but remains immensely frustrating overall due to the issues on display. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre fare or who are curious about it will want to give it a shot, while most others out there should heed caution.
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