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Released by: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Released on: February 18th, 2014.
Director: Christopher Hatton
Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Melanie Zanetti, David Field, Jen Sung, Matt Doran
Year: 2013
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The Movie:
Dolph Lundgren has fought a lot of things over his long and storied career. He started off by fighting Rocky as a Russian but would later fight Russians himself. He fought an alien, he fought Skeletor and he fought Jean-Claude Van Damme. In The Punisher he fought crime, in Uwe Boll's Return Of The King II he fought for redemption and in Bridge Of Dragons he fought for love but this 2013 movie from writer/director Christopher Hatton marks the first time that Dolph has, on screen at least, fought with zombies. Only they're not zombies, they're 'infected' - or so we're told in an opening credits scrawl that doesn't really wind up mattering much.
What matters is this - a big city in Thailand is completely overrun with 'infected' people who look and act just like zombies. Only they're the fast kind, not the traditional George A. Romero kind. Think 28 Days Later and you're on the right track here. The rich corporate jerk whose company is responsible for whatever it was that caused this to happen knows that his daughter is in that city. Before he and some other firebomb the place, he wants to get her out. This jerk also knows that there's only one man who can get in and get out in time with his daughter's life intact, and that man is none other than Major Max Gatling (Dolph, of course). He calls him into a meeting, explains the situation and before you know it, Max and his team of commandos are running around the streets of Thailand fighting off hordes of zombies. It's not as easy as it looks, which Max's teammates find out the hard way.
When he's the only one left, he winds up running into the very woman he's looking for, Jude (Melanie Zanetti). She takes him back to a compound run by an eccentric older man named Duke (David Field) and introduces him to her boyfriend Reese (Matt Doran), a girl named Anna (Oda Maria), a woman named Lynn (Lydia Look) and a tough Thai dude named Elvis (Jen Sung) who wanders around with a big machete all the time. They take him in and talk about how to get out of this mess but soon Max puts his mission first and tries to get Jude out without anyone noticing. No dice, Max! Duke and Elvis know what's going on and tie him to a street post in the middle of the street to let the zombies who are not zombies feast on his entrails. Only there's one thing they didn't count on, and that's the Max Factor. He survives the attack and makes his way out, after which he decides to help everyone get out of the city before the firebombs come. How will he do this? With the help of some killer robots (that appear to have been used in Hatton's earlier movie, Robotropolis!) that he befriends and trains to obey his every command!
While there's no doubt that the shaky cam overused in pretty much all of the movie's action scenes and the hyperkinetic editing style will understandably turn some off, Battle Of The Damned is a movie that knows just what it wants to do and it sets out to accomplish just that: showcase Dolph fighting zombies with the help of some robots. Whatever plot development we get outside of that is really just an inconsequential bonus. This movie is not deep, it doesn't try to be deep, it requires no actual thought nor does it try to elaborate on important themes with any sort of subtext or social commentary. No, what it does is let Dolph and company run around a pseudo post-apocalyptic Asian city and beat the ever-loving hell out of whatever gets in their way and, despite some obvious flaws, it works.
Flaws? Yeah, the editing, the shaky cam - those were already mentioned. There's also some goofy CGI, bad stereotypical one dimensional characters and a really predictable plot. None of this really hurts things though, because Battle Of The Damned doesn't stop to worry about things like that. Its singular focus is on the Dolph/Zombie thing and it stays on it with near laser precision, subplots be damned (there are one or two but they barely matter). The makeup effects are hard to gauge because the camera tends to move pretty quickly but some shots do show some pretty cool appliance and design work, others not so much. The movie delivers a fair bit of gore though it never goes quite as over the top as you'd have probably hoped it would. There's a supporting cast and they all more or less make it through with varying degrees of success and irrelevance but David Field's Duke is moderately enjoyable in an incredibly cliche sort of way. Dolph carries it though. He barges through the film with all the grace of a bull in a china shop and enough charisma and screen presence all of this complete and utter silliness a whole lot of good B-movie fun. Bring on the sequel.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Battle Of The Damned arrives on Blu-ray from Anchor Bay Entertainment in AVC encoded 1080p high definition widescreen in 1.78.1. There's not much to complain about here at all, the movie looks pretty strong in high definition. Some very mild aliasing can be spotted here and there but otherwise the image is strong, nicely detailed and quite colorful, though some of the earlier scenes have a blue tint to them. Explosions and gun shots look good and don't break up into compression artifacts while black levels stay solid throughout without smearing or destroying shadow detail. Skin tones look lifelike and there's plenty of texture to ogle and detail to appreciate both in the foreground and the background of pretty much every shot.
The only audio option on this set is an English language Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix. Optional subtitles are provided in English SDH and Spanish. The movie features plenty of shoot outs and explosions and so we get a lot of rear channel and surround activity throughout. The low end offers up some nice rumble to anchor the action without burying the performers while the dialogue stays clean, clear and always discernible. There are no problems with any hiss or distortion anywhere in the mix. Some of the quieter moments offer up some nice subtle background details here and there but where the mix is at its best is during the more intense moments of the movie.
Outside of a few previews that play before the main menu screens load, the only extra on the disc is a seven minute behind the scenes featurette. It's shot 'fly on the wall' style so while it gives us a look at some of the cast and crew hard at work, it doesn't have a whole lot of context. Some interviews with the director or with Dolph would have been fun, but that didn't happen.
The Final Word:
Battle Of The Damned might not be particularly original and its flaws are pretty obvious BUT if you're a Dolph fan, there's a lot of fun to be had here. It's hard to take any of this all too seriously, but then, we're not asked to. This is a movie where Dolph Lundgren befriends some killer robots and fights zombies - what more do you want? Anchor Bay's Blu-ray is a disappointment in the extra features department but at least it looks and sounds quite good.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
