Low Budget Terror: 'The Sky Has fallen'

It has to be said, as Indie films go, there is a massive over-saturation of zombie films floating around the DVD shelves. This could be down to the facts that making a post-apocalyptic movie with zombie antagonists is simply the cheapest way to get a horror film made. It worked for George.A.Romero and co back in the 60s and it clearly can still work today. Unfortunately, something has been lost in translation over the years meaning character, plot and motivation have been left on the cutting room floor in favour of having the most blood on screen. Which brings me to this weeks movie review, a low-budget indie called The Sky Has Fallen.

The plot comprises a lone sword-wielding survivor Lance who is deep in the woods searching for the creatures that started this apocalypse. It seems Zombies are merely pawns to a master race that is somehow born out of the living. Meeting mysterious survivor Rachel they team up to fight back against the monsters that have taken over the world. Can they find the "boss" and put an end to all this horror? Well, that'd be telling.

The Sky Has Fallen was the brainchild of Doug Roos who not only wrote and directed but produced, shot and even helped with make-up on occasion. Frankly, I'm always impressed with an indie director who manages to actually get a budget together and complete their first picture. However, that aside, The Sky Has Fallen fails to convincingly become the fast-paced zombie movie it set out to be.

On the surface, the movie looks good, well as good as a still image can look that is. The movie fails to actually hold attention in the right place and you'll be left with too many locked off shots that offer nothing but bland character exposition. In the scenes involving the zombies and cloaked creatures, we never get a chance to enjoy these low budget fx as the camera pans away too fast and we're left with pointless shots of marauding legs advancing on our central characters. Such a shame as the make-up is one of the movie's BIGGEST selling points and an achievement on such a low budgeted movie, I just wish we had a few more lingering shots to enjoy them.

The worst offense this movie commits, in my opinion, has to got to be the very bland acting of the two central characters. The scenes where they explain each-others backstories is painful to watch as they recite their lines without any sort of inflection whatsoever. You could argue that they're simply shell-shocked over the loss of civilization and perhaps cut off from their emotions. I'm not buying that explanation myself and think a little more rehearsal and perhaps even ad-libbing could have made this film a cult classic along the lines of better zombie splatter-fests like Brain Dead and Undead.

The action scenes littered throughout also should have been a fun selling point to the movie with Lance dispatching the dead with a samurai sword. Unfortunately, the choreography simply isn't there and to make up for this the editor (also the director) has chosen to cut around this with blood flying all over the surrounding landscapes indicating the battle is won! This doesn't work well and after the first scene like this, you've seen the best the movie's going to offer.

Still, it got some appreciation at various festivals hich proves once again that certificates don't mean jack!

Overall

The Sky Has Fallen is an excruciatingly slow movie that offers a very bland template of zombie action scenes and dire speech recitals. I congratulate the fact the makers managed to make a feature film by working extra night shifts in retail (a battle in itself) to get the budget up to scratch and complete the production. However, the movie ultimately feels like a short film that got out of hand and I think it would have worked a hell of a lot more effectively with a 5-minute run-time instead of nearly an hour and a half. I give this film 1 star out of a possible 5.