Wyrmwood: Apocalypse

  Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is the eight-years in the making continuation of the Wyrmwood saga. That's the one where they use zombie breath to fuel cars, in case you've forgotten.

 Siblings Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey) are still running around, trying to survive - Bianca, who was injected with some weird fluorescent zombie juice in the first one by a mad scientist, is basically a zombie herself now, though a more reasonable one.
 Not reasonable enough to avoid biting the neck of one of another pair of siblings Barry and she are running with now, though. Understandably, the sisters, Grace (Tasia Zalar) and Maxi (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) take offence/are horrified at this and decide to split post-haste.

 At this point the action starts following a mercenary named Rhys (Luke McKenzie), the twin brother of a soldier Barry had to deal with (fatally) in the first movie. His introduction is really great, as he goes around his small compound and follows his morning routine; the guy's got the post-apocalypse all figured out.
 Rhys's job is to fetch people and bring them to a tiny underground facility that's run by, oh shit, is that supposed to be the mad scientist from the first movie? How did he survive?
 Well, maybe he isn't, since he's played by a different actor (Nicholas Boshier.) In any case, Rhys thinks he's rounding up people so they can work on a cure, and it's assumed he doesn't suspect they're doing the sort of shit we know they do down there. So he's a good guy working for bad people, though he should really fucking know better.

 Things kick into gear when Rhys ambushes Grace and Maxi and manages to take Grace to the lab. Maxi, in turn, manages to catch Rhys unawares later, and forces him to help him rescue her sister. In due course Rhys's eyes are opened to the sort of shit the government-type shady bastards are up to, and they get together with Barry and Brooke for a couple of climactic confrontations.

 The plot is more than a little loopy, but it's fun and propulsive, and the amount of conflicts between the characters keeps things unpredictable. The Roche-Turner brothers have gotten better at the modest sort of spectacle they enjoy delivering, increasing the scope a little without losing any of the energy or the sense of fun. The action here is varied, including car chases, a giant mutant zombie fight, big explosions, an air cannon, a gatling gun, and of course, lots of zombies, though they take a back seat as most of the fights are against soldier-types.

 More of the same, and in this case that's not a bad thing at all. As long as they keep making them, and keep this level of crazy, early Raimi/Miller-style vibes, I'll keep watching them.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

 Wyrmwood's apocalypse is weird.
 On the one hand you have an airborne...something... that turns people into zombies, brought on by a meteor shower. There's the rare individual who's somehow immune, but for everyone else, it's gasmasks or zombiehood.
 So far. so good. But whatever happened, it also rendered all oil inert; gas won't burn, and, more importantly, gasoline doesn't work as fuel for cars any more. It'd be a weird detail, except that later on people figure out that zombie breath (and farts) are not just flammable, but work as a perfectly acceptable fuel substitute.
 It's a... creative way to kick off a Mad Max / Zombie mashup, to be sure.

 Wyrmwood is a 2014 Australian action/horror/comedy hybrid written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner (his brother Tristan co-writes and produces). It starts on the same night everything goes to shit, following two siblings separately - Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who both happen to be immune to whatever's causing people to turn undead.
 Well, actually it starts in media res, in a scene from the middle of the film they later just repeat, but let's skip that.

 In any case: Brooke is an artist who barely survives an attack in her studio from her now-zombified model and assistant. She calls her brother to warn him something bad is happening, to get out of town, and is then taken by some sort of military group.
 Barry in turn deals with a home invasion (in a particularly brutal fashion; the dude acts like he's in a zombie movie long before he realizes he actually is in one) and takes his family on the road until they discover gasoline is no good any more. Luckily, they all have gas masks; The bad news is that, well, they're not very good at using them. Barry's wife and child don't share his immunity, and it's not long before he has to put them down.

 This leaves him understandably suicidal; lucky for him, another survivor pops by and stops him from finishing himself. Before long, Barry's found himself a group of survivors, and they discover that they can use zombies as fuel; so they do what any bunch of zombie movie protagonists would; they suit up with paintball armor until they look like the baddies in a 1980s SNK game, convert a pick-up truck into a tank and plug in some zombies into the engine to harness their burps as fuel. Y'know, the usual.

 Meanwhile, Brooke is handcuffed to the wall in some sort of laboratory where a mad scientist, working with the military, is running ethically dubious and painful tests on a bunch of people who are immune to the disease. Can't say I agree with his methods, but you have to respect that he was already set up and working on a plan pretty much on the eve of when things went to shit; that's way more foresight and organizational ability that I'd be willing to credit any governmental agency with. In any case, in between being experimented on and trying to escape, Brooke... uh, discovers that she can take control of zombies telepathically.

 And honestly, that's ok. Because if we've accepted zombie farts can magically power internal combustion engines, pretty much anything goes at this point, right?

 What the movie lacks in consistency, budget or sanity, it makes up for with a manic, likeable energy. It's not a good movie, exactly -to be honest, I'm don't think it's even aiming for quality; But it's seriously entertaining.
 By the third act the pieces have fallen into place, the two plot lines intersect, and it turns into the Mad Max B-movie it wanted to be all along; Despite all the rough patches, jittery action, crappy CGI blood splatters, dubious character work and the mad libs script, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the ride.

Nekrotronic

From the first days of humankind, infernal beings have lived among us. Trying to possess us, causing suffering and mayhem and... you know, demons will be demons. They had us against the ropes, a handy animated introduction lore-dump tells us, until some people rose against them and got magical powers and vanished most of them back to hell.

 But some remain among us, both devils and hunters, waging a war unseen that can determine the... whatever and you get it by now. Basically, the plot of every other horror/fantasy nerd-baiting manga/RPG/videogame mediocrity.

 I wish I could say Nekrotronic - Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner's follow up to Wyrmwood - rises above those uninspired origins. And actually I will say it, because that's a pretty low bar to clear. Maybe I'll mumble a little while I say it, though, because it's not great either: It spends too much time setting up a universe that isn't that interesting, throws in a quite a few jokes that don't work, and its low-budget action varies wildly in quality and effectiveness.

 It starts promisingly enough: After the prologue we're introduced to our protagonist Howard (Ben O'Toole), a sewage worker and his buddy Rangi (Epine Bob Savea) - ostensibly a co-worker, but he just stays in the truck playing on his phone all the time. They have a likeable enough chemistry. It's Rangi's game that starts driving the plot, because it (a kind of Pokemon Go with ghosts) is actually part of an evil corporation's plan to use phones to possess people en masse. Oh, and yeah, apparently demons from hell found a way to get into the internet. Which you'd think might be used as commentary, but nope.

 Soon enough those demons enter the picture, leading our protagonists to realize there's a secret world filled with hostile occult forces - something about reality being a sugar-coated topping, etc. etc. While running away, they get rescued by Luther (David Wenham), a guy who kind of looks like Sean Bean and drives around in a high-tech van with his two beautiful daughters (Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich).

(Spoilers from here on out - you have been warned!)

 Luther does indeed get Sean Beaned, but not before explaining to our intrepid protagonist that the demon hunter powers are hereditary, and he's the son of the demon hunterest demon hunters that ever demon hunted. Oh, and his mom (Monica Bellucci!!) got possessed and is the big bad.
 Howard's buddy is shortly killed but brought back as a ghost who follows everyone around, kind of like a lame, unfunny Griffin Dunne; his main thing is popping up leaning casually at weird angles, something the filmmakers apparently thought was hilarious. I guess Joe Piscopo in Dead Heat is a better comparison.

 Will young Howard master his gifts? Will the prettiest demon hunter daughter inexplicably fall for him in the few hours they have together? Well, yeah, duh. But what is pretty unexpected is that along the way Howard fucks up, repeatedly, to a degree that these movies seldom have the balls to pursue. Sure, it makes it that much harder to buy him as a hero (or to understand why two certified, experienced badasses would come to like him or even put up with him) but it offers up some really funny moments in a movie that mostly flubs it jokes.

 It's an action/horror/comedy hybrid with just a few laughs and no scares, so the action has to pick up the slack. And it does, kind of, in a very low-key, low-budget way. Despite a few exposition dumps, the script keeps things more or less lively. Visually, I liked the designs. There's not a lot of elaborate stuff, not with the budget the filmmakers were working with, but some of them are pretty out there:

Pretty metal, right? Or at least very Doom.

 The whole film's deal is a mix between demons and technology, and it does ok on that front. The effects are a mix of practical and digital with, well, mixed but mostly likeable results. There's some shootouts, some cool ghosts, a lot of energy attacks and wavy power lines coming out of hands. It won't blow anyone away, but there's an energy to it I kind of enjoyed, at least when the filmmakers weren't shaking the camera for (shitty) effect.

 So definitely not a great movie, and maybe not one I'd recommend, but... I don't know, it's kind of fun. It's silly, overstuffed, buys into its own mythos with way too much enthusiasm, and honestly it's just kind of a mess overall, but I found it enjoyable. It's similar to Wyrmwood, but where that film's oddball ideas mostly worked, the ones here mostly don't.