This is indeed as schlocky as its poster suggests. It's not bad, but it could've been better. I think it wants to be Zombieland, which hits the sweet spot of almost PG-13 Horror comedy with heart, and like that film, it looks like it was a pilot for a TV series at one point. But I'm not sure of its audience - it was too young for me but it also has sex references, so... All right, now I describe it, the audience is obviously teenagers. But it could stand a bit more grit - it's too shiny-surfaced. Actually, I've thought of the perfect comparison for it: Tremors. It's nowhere near as good as Tremors (what film could be?) but it's in the same niche, only playing up the romance a bit, and trying to add some heartfelt lessons about community, which is never a good idea. From Zombieland it takes the "post-apocalyptic road trip" idea, where you meet strangers along the way and talk about the loved ones you've lost, and from Tremors it takes the big-ass monsters, and a couple of cases, they come up from underground, too. These monsters are CGI, though, which always takes away a bit from the fun.
Anyway, brief summary. (I'm not going to name any of the actors, other than Michal "Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer" Rooker (who was significantly softened his image by being a favorite of James Gunn) because they're pretty generic and I don't foresee them going on to great things.) Our hero, Joel, reveals in a voiceover at the beginning that he's living in an underground bunker because of the apocalypse. In a meta-commentary on the saturation of dystopias in films and TV these days he says "everyone expected it, just not this weird"(read, stupid and contrived). Essentially, an asteroid was going to hit Earth but (in an eventuality that the pandemic has revealed to be very implausible) Earth banded together to make rockets to blow it up, only their chemical-soaked remnants fell back to earth and caused apparently all non-mammals (or birds) to become giant monsters. Well, it can't be all, because if every insect on the planet grew as some in this film do (notably a centipede), there would be more insect than planet. But I digress. In a flashback we see 17-year-old Joel making out with his girlfriend Aimee in the back of her car (for, it is implied, the first time) when the remnants start to fall and they get separated, ending up in different bunkers. However, Joel has found her bunker over shortwave radio and he gets to talk to her a bit once in a while. He is feeling increasingly left out in his bunker, as he's the only one who hasn't "paired up" (and it's made clear it's like being the one virgin in a frat house) and he's useless in going on raids or defending the bunker from monstrous incursions, because he "freezes up" when faced with danger. (Later on this is traced in flashback to the moment he saw his parents squashed in their car by a giant monster foot just after they've made him get out.) So, he decides to go in search of Aimee's bunker. Everyone thinks he'll never make it, but, armed with a trusty crossbow and his sketchbook, wherein he collects pictures of the monsters he knows along with useful factoids about them, he's off. Along the way he meets a dog ("Boy")
who helps him, and an old(ish) man (Rooker) and spunky young tyke ("Minnow"), unrelated, but paired up because everyone they were related to has been killed,
and at one point a robot, who gets him to confront his feelings about his parents' death and plays "Stand by Me" until her (her name is Mav1s) battery runs out,
and learns valuable lessons while bumping off/avoiding various monsters. One lesson is that not all monsters are harmful, something that comes in handy in the climax of the film in an encounter with an apparently murderous giant crab.
He does indeed make it to Aimee's bunker
(which seems WAY better than his, because it opens on to a beach), after losing Boy (permanently???) and getting covered in leeches that pump him full of hallucinogens, only to find (a) that she's had and lost a partner in the intervening seven years and is not ready to be into him, and (b) that a yacht has anchored offshore ready to ferry off this bunker's inhabitants (who, apart from Aimee, are all geriatric - most of her job is caring for them). Of course these sailors, led by an Australian (in American fiction never trust an Australian - Americans seem to feel as threatened by Australians as Europeans do by Americans, perhaps because Australian actors steal all the acting jobs in Hollywood) called "Cap" are not who they seem.
A not-unpleasant diversion, but (a) it seems like a pilot for a TV show, and (b) the kind of TV show you'd watch when you're just not up for thinking about anything. In the old days, it would've been produced by Aaron Spelling. If it's a choice between this and re-watching Tremors for the first time in ages, pick the latter.
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