I'm back here in the Worst of the Worst series, and today I'm taking my own look at Astro-Zombies M3 - Cloned. Al already covered a lot of this, so I think I'm going to more zoom in on a couple particularly giant problems.
AZM3C is just amazingly awful, especially, as Al noted, coming from a Director who at least had considerable experience in film-making. You'd expect someone to get better through practice, at least a little. If that's the case here, I'm terrified of what I would see if I went back and watched earlier works (Editors Note: They mostly sucked too).
The main thing I don't understand is how a film with this simple of a concept got so needlessly over-complicated and managed to be so utterly confusing. At heart, this plot is so easy: A misguided and/or evil military decides to dig up the bones of a horrible monster / psychopathic killer / whatever the astro-man was and clone it to be used as an unstoppable super-soldier. Predictably, something goes wrong, several copies of the unstoppable killer get loose, and it's up to [insert heroes here] to save the day or at least stay alive.
That's pretty easy. It's not especially interesting, but it's easy, and you could make a watchable film out of the basic idea.
This is not that Film.
That's exacerbated by the fact that some characters seem to be working for more than one of these factions, without any sign that they've changed sides or were playing one side and really working for the other or anything like that. There's this lady with a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat who seems at first to maybe be working for the senator, but then seems to be working for the supervillain, but I couldn't tell if that meant the supervillain and the senator were also aligned or if they didn't know each other. Maybe I missed something. The supervillain lady has this preserved head of the scientist lady's grandfather, too, who seemed like maybe he was against her or maybe he was for her, and I wasn't clear which. And the Doll Squad, a team of, I guess, highly trained secret agents, are called in twice in the film...once by the senator who appears to be investigating the astro-man project, and once by one of the main heads of the astro-man project.
Speaking of that, why was that even necessary? Why do the Doll Squad members have to be called in twice? The senator calls them in, then their squad leader is captured, and then we just kind of check in on her a couple times until eventually an entire second squad is called in and she just ends up escaping, coming to join them with, I guess, her own team. That entire thing could've been done more cleanly by having them just called in at first, the leader captured, and the rest of the squad working to free her to eat up a little time before getting back to their mission.
There's just too many factions involved, in too unclear a fashion, and I've left out things like the general's unnecessary twin brother, the scientist lady's maybe love interest, the author we spend just an incredible amount of time with considering how utterly unimportant he is to the plot (seriously, the movie might as well have just put a sign up that said "we were deliberately wasting your time" with a picture of a raised middle finger in his final scene)...there's so many people involved, and it just isn't at all clear who is working together, who is competing, and who appears to be working together but is actually competing or vice-versa.
But I think the thing that hurt the film's overall plotting more than anything, though, was that it focused on precisely the wrong part of the plot.
To reiterate: This is a movie about a secret government weapons project going off the rails and killing people.
When you make that movie, you focus on the "going off the rails and killing people."
This movie focused on the project itself.
Thrill to status update meetings! Get chills as the budget is called into question! Gasp as people sit around tables! Stare in wonder at the basic whiteboard with "Bio-terrorism" written on it in plain lettering, yet another sign that no one in this movie could be bothered to make the slightest bit of effort!
I swear that you're like two-thirds to three-quarters through the movie before the dang astro-zombies escape and start running around killing people. There's one or two deaths before that, sure, but they change nothing. "Oh, the mutant woke up and killed a security guard? Oh, well. We won't fire anyone related to the project or even do more than gently scold them. We'll just make vague threats about wanting to see a return on our investment and then leave everything as-is."
...yeah, speaking of, I love how passe everyone is about the scientist lady actually having managed to clone one of these things. With a full outfit and machete, no less, 'cause those are totally part of your body! I mean...look...either this military is some kind of evil empire, in which case they should be totally cool with the security guy being offed because their scientist just cloned a super-weapon, or it isn't, in which case it should be all, "we don't care you cloned something in a way that totally defies logic because an innocent person died in the process and we're arresting you for at the very least gross negligence resulting in death, see ya."
I mean, she totally sends the security guard into the room, alone, knowing that she's just cloned a creature known for flipping out and killing people. All the while, she's literally making a speech about how she just got to play god and create life and other mad scientist cliches. If there's one part of the project plot that should get more focus, it's some actual consequences for that, even if those consequences are just "character X wakes up and realizes he/she works for an evil organization and provides information to heroes to stop it" or something like that...which doesn't really ever happen, until maybe kindasorta near the end, far, far after this event and after character X gives a speech to the very scientist lady responsible for the deaths noting that he's proud of her for reasons unclear to me.
mes from. The film chooses to focus on the project to develop the astro-men, the trouble the project goes through, the threats to close it, the debates over whether it is the right tactic, that sort of thing. In order to do that, they need - you guessed it - a bunch of competing factions who get involved in some way with the project. There's factions developing it, factions investigating it, factions that want to take it down, factions that want to take it for themselves, factions that want to let someone else develop it but then maybe take credit for it or something like that...we get into the mess that I identified above, and a large part of it is due to the simple fact that the movie chooses to focus on the project rather than the result.
Look...you can do this so much better. Start the film with the project. Spend like 10 minutes on it, 15 tops, with clear signs things are going to go wrong. Then, boom, the astro-men escape, and we focus on one to four characters we most care about, probably the scientist lady, the guy who seems to supervise her, the scientist lady's love interest, and the supervisor guy's wife. Those four are shown running from the astro-men and trying to stay away from them while trying to get to some sort of special contact that can put them in touch with the Doll Squad and/or retrieve a weapon that can actually harm these uncontrollable monsters that someone, for some reason, thought it was a good idea to make functionally invulnerable. Meanwhile, the astro-men wreak havoc in the city, and because they're functionally invulnerable, people who try to fight them without [insert super-weapon here] end up dead.
It's a very basic template, but it can work! You can tweak it here and there if you want to put focus on different stuff - for instance, maybe the Doll Squad is sent in by the senator, still, but things have already gone to heck when they get there, so they go around trying to keep people safe while trying to find someone who knows how to kill the astro-men. Boom. Second plot, set up in like a minute.
You don't even actually have to have (much) more physical conflict than the movie had! Just spread parts of the ending rampage across the film, intersperse it with scenes focusing on the heroes trying to get from point A to point B, and then the end of the film can be mostly Doll Squad members and/or other heroes managing to finally wipe out the astro-men with the super-weapon. Rather than one annoyingly long "action" scene, you can get a whole bunch of smaller "action" scenes.
You need to also do them well enough for me to call them action rather than "action," of course, but that's a whole other matter.
The point is that while I don't think this was ever going to be a good film, it could've been a moderately enjoyable cheesy low-budget monster attack flick if they just picked the right thing to focus on and trimmed down their cast a whole heck of a lot.
- The astro-zombies know about four ways of attacking someone, and it gets really, really repetitive.
- Hack into shoulder
- Cut off head
- Cut throat from behind
- Throw machete or other bladed implement, hit precisely the same position on chest on each person.
- The astro-zombies, being created as super-soldiers meant to lead the military to victory in any battle ever, have no discernible fighting ability, nor any urge whatsoever to defend themselves. Ever. If someone takes aggressive action at them, they do not in any way attempt to dodge, block, parry, or anything like that. It doesn't matter where they are. It doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are aware of their attacker or not. They utterly fail to even attempt to defend.
- This would be acceptable if we were shown, repeatedly, that they were in fact invulnerable or regenerated as we were told they would earlier in the film. But we aren't. Instead, once the Doll Squad gets involved and is therefore there to actually try to fight the astro-zombies, the Doll Squad already has the explosive darts that can kill the astro-zombies...so to the best of my recollection, we never get any combat scene were someone tries to harm an astro-zombie and it regenerates or they otherwise fail to take it down. There's one scene earlier where someone experimentally cuts off the limb of one of the clones, but that's it. We never see their vaunted regenerative powers in actual combat.
- What this boils down to is that we get a whole ton of scenes of Doll Squad members running through town, spotting an astro-zombie, and shooting an explosive dart at it, whereupon it takes the dart with no attempt to dodge and explodes. Sometimes the movie mixes it up a little by having the Doll Squad person stab the dart in by hand and then blow it up with a remote. But that's really it. In only one scene does a Doll Squad member get caught remotely unaware and have to defend herself, and she still does that super-easily.
- There's one bit that at least stands out, though not for good reasons, where a Doll Squad person nonsensically runs up to an astro-zombie, clubs it in the face with her blowgun to knock it down, then loads the blowgun and fires a dart from it rather than just stabbing the dart in. There's no reason she couldn't just shoot the dart at first, to my recollection (I'm pretty sure I recall her running at the zombie, or at least having plenty of time to shoot before it got to her), and also no reason she couldn't just stab the dart in later. Either do ranged or melee for a scene like that, folks - or give the person a clear reason they have to switch between. It makes little sense otherwise.
- So...basically...next time, how about instead of cloning psychopathic monsters and making them not-actually-all-that-invulnerable, maybe the military should just call in the Doll Squad.
I'll leave it there. This was an utterly awful film, though I will say it was at least better than the prior two we've watched for Worst of the Worst. Not that that's a real compliment, mind. Until next time...I'm going to go watch some films that don't make me wonder how much of my soul died during the runtime.
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