Automaton Transfusion
More fast zombies. But don’t be discouraged, this time it looks plausibly done. This film, directed by newcomer Steven C. Miller, has piqued my interest on a number of levels. Automaton Transfusion, according to the posts and reviews on horror-movies.ca anyway, was made in 9 days for a mere $30,000. From the look of the trailer that’s actually quite an accomplishment. I’ve noticed that a few of the “reviews” have been written by people who were involved in the film so we’ll wait to see more independent opinions though the one’s I’ve seen are fairly positive.
Here’s the synopsis:
In the early 1970s when everyone in America was worrying about what was going on in Vietnam, the United States Army was secretly developing a way to reanimate the dead. The hope was to have the dead fight instead of the living, but the experiments were shut down when the reanimated corpses were unable to control their hunger for human flesh.
Thirty years later the army has decided to reopen the project. Grover City, because of its remote location, would be the home of their main testing facilities. Without warning the experiments go horribly wrong in Grover City and the DEAD are now on the rampage, eating everyone in sight.
With the town overtaken by Zombies, a group of High School seniors take it upon themselves to fight back and find a cure for this deadly disease.
Automaton Transfusion is a non-stop adventure of four friends battling there way through swamps, forests, blood, and ZOMBIES to survive!
And here’s the trailer:
Nicely done. This trailer had me at the obligatory homage to Evil Dead’s Ash. Although I didn’t like the bit about it claiming to be the defining horror film of a generation. I’ll overlook that as the rest of it grabbed my attention. There was a definite intensity to the deliciously gore filled action thanks to the energetic camera work. Hopefully the entire film is this relentless.
Surprising as well is that the filmmakers snagged such a boatload of extras to portray the all important zombie hordes in the film. Props that eat can be expensive. I’ve seen many a craft service table decimated by only 20 background performers and this looked like far more. My bet is there was a pizza sponsor in there somewhere. Good thing too, without zombies you don’t have much of a zombie movie.
Thankfully there were no recognizable stars (see my post on the upcoming Day of the Dead remake below) to take us out of the action. It also appears that this is a film full of down and dirty zombie chomping action. Exactly what the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake seemed to promise but sadly ended up prematurely blowing it’s wad all over itself after only 20 minutes. I’m crossing my fingers hoping the trailer isn’t misleading.
All in all it doesn’t look half bad. I’ll check this one out for sure when it comes around, not only because it looks like a decent zombie film but also for my interest in seeing if a film made for that small amount of money in such a short amount of time can actually achieve its aim beginning to end.
There’s no official release date yet. I’ll keep y’all posted.
Thanks to Zombie-A-GoGo for the heads up on this flick.
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
