Thursday 31 July 2014

13 EERIE

SPOILERS? CHECK.

Remote location? Check. Deserted shacks and outbuildings? Check. Hot young girls and hunks? Check. Recognisable genre figure in the cast? Check. Ineffective authority figure? Check. Dumbass stoner? Check. Splattery gore effects? Check. Shambling undead? Check. Anything you haven't seen before a couple of hundred times? Er....

13 Eerie is an entirely functional, by-the-numbers zombie quickie orchestrated with almost military efficiency to adhere to the template as closely as possible, and could scarcely have been less formulaic if there'd been a bloke with a clipboard ticking every last conceivable genre trope off a typed list. A busload of forensics students turn up at an abandoned prison for a field exam and pair off to find and examine rotting cadavers in the wild. But what they don't know is that the prison was used for secret government experiments that turned the Death Row inmates into flesh eating zombies - and they're still there....

It's unremarkable, unsurprising, unexceptional. It has a pleasing level of disgust in the corpse effects and bloody gore scenes, though, and it rattles along painlessly enough without recourse to lame zombie movie in-jokes or, despite the use of video cameras and monitors, the techniques of found footage (such as they are).. The cast mostly do their thing - they're headed by Katharine Isabelle from American Mary and the Ginger Snaps series - and it's bolted together competently enough. Sadly, being competent and unremarkable and having Katharine Isabelle in the cast is about all that can be said for it.

**

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