Oh, my stars and garters, I do believe I've got the vapors, honey! I experienced one helluva Asylum movie tonight!
A "Mad Max" mockbuster in name and aesthetic only, this is a kickin' movie about a ragtag group of post-viral-apocalypse humans fighting to survive a plague that has turned everyone else into vampires.
Sound familiar?
Richard Matheson and Will Smith, put your damn hands down, FFS. Of course it sounds familiar. This is The Asylum, after all.
But unlike usual The Asylum pablum, the filmmakers (credit Asylum go-to guy Mark Atkins, most of whose filmography should be printed on used baby wipes) have somehow managed to tell a compelling story! The twists are not obvious, the actors are not all uniformly bad, and the movie is actually quite entertaining on a level beyond the "so bad it's good" brass ring this negative-10th-rate studio usually reaches for.
Look, it does suffer from usual The Asylum failings -- choppy editing, WTF narrative decisions, actors who appear to have been cast because they happened to be next in line behind the casting director at Burger King.
But they're markedly fewer than usually present in The Asylum films. It's like the studio is slowly recovering from a terrible movie disease.
And so, I am glad to report to you that "Road Wars" is a hoot. An absolute hootenanny of cool cars, zombie vampires and plucky protagonists, all filmed in the desert through a camera filter that makes everything orange. That works, too, surprisingly.
The cars are great. The vampires are great. The story works. There's tension. There's drama. There's surprises. This is a The Asylum film, and the story actually is coherent and compelling! Seriously, I'm gonna play the lottery tomorrow, because I can't believe my run of luck here.
Somehow, mixing "Mad Max" with "I Am Legend" was a heavenly Reese's chocolate-and-peanut-butter match. It's astounding how well this movie works, and how much fun it is.
Check it out. Seriously.
