THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Asia has become a primary site for developing viral based weaponry and undergoing less harmful biological research. Unfortunately, a lethal virus escaped the lab and turned the inhabitants of a nearby city into flesh-munching Zombies. Fearing further outbreak, the government quarantined the city with heavy military blockades - no one gets in or out. However, a small group of individuals survived the deadly plague and relentless Zombies, one of them the daughter of the rich-industrialist who created the Zombie virus in the first place, only to be trapped inside the failing city of the dead. Major Max Gatling is recruited, along with his team of mercenaries, and is ordered into the 'hot zone' to rescue the stuck daughter.

MY VERDICT:

Battle of the Damned is a fairly short movie at an hour and a half, that does not really seem to go anywhere - a guy is sent in to hostile territory on a mission but, by the end of the movie, it's left unclear as to whether he has completed that mission or not. The story in general has quite a lot of plotholes such as why the daughter of the person who engineered the virus is so important or how only a group of five or six individuals managed to survive the initial outbreak, seemingly unscathed, while an entire city was consumed. Also, a group of killer robots turn up half-way through the action (yes, it's that kind of movie) with next to no explanation other than "they walked here from Tokyo". The Zombies do actually target these robots and actually, mostly off-screen, manage to 'destroy' all but one of them - again, I have no idea why Zombies, driven only by the desire for human flesh, would attack a seven-foot tall, mechanical robot. Another failing of the movie is that everyone, the robots too after they have been spliced to use conventional weapons, never run out of ammo or stop to reload - realism or believability was clearly never a major concern for this "Zombies vs Robots" film. Despite all the criticism, Battle of the Damned is a decent movie; it's not original, thought-provoking, particularly well-written or acted to perfection but it is in no way unwatchable.