FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

When a deadly chemical weapons sale goes horribly wrong, shots are fired and the gasses are expelled, creating ravenous, flesh-craving “zombies” dubbed Sickos. The disease travels quickly and affects anyone bitten or swapping fluids with the grotesque monsters. Who can possibly stop them? That’d be El Wray, a well-known local criminal and the best darn shooter you’ve ever seen. With the help of his stripper ex-girlfriend Cherry and a colorful supporting cast, he’s out to stop the terror before it envelopes the entire planet.

The homage to 1970s exploitation and B-grade movies is immediately evident and an incredible joy to watch. The opening credit sequence starts to roll with an intentionally cheesy montage of Cherry, played by Rose McGowan, dancing and writhing on her stripper pole in front of an unseen audience while equally cheesy music gives us a perfect taste of what we’re in for. We’re in for about an hour and a half of glorious gratuitous schlock of all kinds.

Auteur Robert Rodriguez, performing the roles of writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor and providing original music (along with Graeme Revell and Carl Thiel), does an outstanding job of staying true to the spirit of the movies he’s paying homage to. All of the bad dialogue and crazy situations and the seemingly random yet still totally predictable plot work in tandem to perfectly walk on the right side of that line between making fun of bad movies and making a bad movie. What we end up getting is a slightly exaggerated version, because it’s actually really good.

The movie is hilarious in all the right ways. Obviously the plan is to make fun of itself and how ridiculous (yet simultaneously cool) movies of that time period are. Rodriguez also plays around with the film-going experience of the era. In post-production they added all kinds of film scratches and gate hairs to dirty up the “print,” the audio is given pops and buzzes, and they’ve even inserted a couple instances where they make it look like the film has broken and was spliced back together after missing some key information. Very rarely would a projection actually be this bad if you were attending a double feature in the 1970s, but it makes for some great comedy and adds a nice touch to the overall experience.

My only real gripe with the film is that the acting is a tad too good at times and the production definitely looks like it had a much bigger budget than something like this would have had. With all the gun fights, make-up and gore, massive locations, rockets and explosions, and of course the awesome machine gun leg, it’s hard to believe that a legitimate B-move director would be able to produce something this cool. But, I’ll take a good over-production over a bad over-production any day. And this is one hell of an over-production.

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