Monday, March 3, 2014

Battle of the Damned (2013)


How can you resist a movie with Dolph Lundgren, zombies and killer robots? You can't. You just have to watch it and hope for the best.

Dolph is Major Max Gatling, a commando hired by a wealthy industrialist to rescue his daughter Jude who is trapped in a quarantined city where a virus has been unleashed, causing people to turn into zombies.  Dolph brings a team into the city, but they don't make any progress and lose a few guys, so Dolph decides to go it alone.

When Max rescues Jude by driving up on a motorcycle as a herd of zombies sprint her way, you'd think she would be grateful. But no, because this movie follows the cliche that the person who needs rescuing is a total unappreciative ass to the person trying to help them escape.

Jude is sarcastic, rude, has a bad attitude, and never even thanks Max for saving her from zombies.  Just once I'd like to see the rescuer say, "Really? You don't want me to get you out of this town full of zombies? See ya." and leave the person right where they found them. So since Jude is a pain in the ass, we know Max is going to have to fight in order to get her out of the city to safety.

Turns out there are other survivors in the city who are all holed up in this big... place with a gate. I'm not sure why the zombies can't just open the latch on the gate, but oh well. The survivors have this weird creepy dynamic that makes you wish Max would just leave them all there to die.

So Max runs around killing zombies, trying to rescue Jude, getting handcuffed to a light pole, fighting more zombies, and then the robots show up and Max wonder if they'll kill zombies or humans, or both.  The movie is full of cliches and ridiculous things like walkie talkies going off an inopportune moments.  For a movie with both zombies and robots, it should have been better.
Is Dolph looking real bad or is this bad photoshop?

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