3 out of 10
 

MAN IN BLACK: There's been an outbreak of trashy drivel, sir.
JOKE CRIPPLE: Is it serious?
MAN IN BLACK: People across the nation are reporting a sudden loss of money
in their wallet followed by prolonged drousiness and feelings of tedium.
JOKE CRIPPLE: And my daughter?
MAN IN BLACK: I'm afraid her agent wasn't able to pull her out in time, and
I guess she's all washed up now.
JOKE CRIPPLE: But she's only 9 years old.
MAN IN BLACK: Whether she's 9 or 90, sir, no-one's coming out of this corny
crap with their career intact.

This attrocious sequel, so aptly named "Apocalpse" is the movie that we all thought the first would have been and vice versa. For a conversion of a video game about a handful of survivors fighting against a city of zombies brought back to life by a virus developed by an evil biochemicals company, the original movie was superb. The story was carefully woven with twists and subplots, including, above all, the insane computer that is trying to stop the spread of the virus by killing everyone it can. In the sequel, however, the computer has clearly been promoted to be a scriptwriter and is now trying to stop the development of other dreadful sequels by making the plot of this one as illogical as possible. As the main character, Alice (Mila Jovanovich) from the first movie and a couple of others she collects along the way try to find the genetic engineer's daughter in exchange for
an escape route out of the city, nothing makes any sense from the start to end. How could a private corporation put up a 20 foot concrete wall around an entire city in hours without the inhabitants becoming in any way concerned? How could they "cover up" the trashing of an entire American
city when half of the inhabitants are freed after being checked for the virus? How come the streets are filled with panicing people one minute and seconds later there's only a dozen survivors left in the entire city? How is Alice able to find precisely the one building where others are, and crash through the window at exactly the most opportune moment? At one point a nuke is sent in to destroy the city, yet after it crosses over the city boundaries, it takes about 5 minutes before it explodes, why? Did it
stop for a coffee at Tim Hortons to chat with a couple of cluster bombs and smart Tomahawk for a while? Maybe to skim through its email in the hope of a better career opportunity? And since when would an elite cop tell a couple of civilians who have never even held a gun, "We're going to have to
split up to search this building"?

In the original film, two of the main characters were, indeed, well armed women, yet despite this, partiularly in the case of Rodriguez's Swat Squad Officer, they were women out of their depth, trying to fight insurmountable forces just to survive. This time, however, the females are guntoting
superheros, capable of performing the slickest stunts in all the gravity-defying glory of Charlies Angels, whilst all the others, often precious, well developed characters in the original game such as the STARS Team, are no more than cannon fodder, chucked clumsily onto the screen like
raw meat before a pack of hyenas. Likewise, the writers have tried to transplant Nemesis, the genetically engineered half-human monster, but al they have is some poor dude sweating under a pile of obviously silicone skin walking about in shoes that are clearly too tight for him as he shoots
up the place like the poor man's Terminator. Why? Because the name of the game is to trash the name of a stereotyped multinational that doesn't even exist.

At one point, Alice comments, "The T-Virus brings dead cells back to life." - if that's the case, couldn't they have sprayed some on the cans of celluloid as there's barely single film cell in it with enough life to entertain someone as brain-dead as a zombie. In short, the entire film is
just a sequence of badly written, gruesome scenes, loosely held together with little more than duct tape and shot in Toronto, where most zombie flicks are, primarily as most of the population there are already entirely braindead. With nothing much to offer than a lousy attempt to mimic the style of "The Matrix", the filmmakers resort to T and A. First they start chucking in nude strippers that have become zombies, and by the end of it, even poor Mila Jovanovich, a once a highly respected top professional model, is forced to shed her rags for protracted total nudity in a ludicrously shameful effort to spark some life into this total corpse of a movie.

Stinks as bad as a ten week old stiff