The Rage (2007)

Directed by Robert Kurtzman [Other horror films: The Demolitionist (1995), Wishmaster (1997), Buried Alive (2007)]

I’m sure I’ve said this before in recent times, but I feel I’ve grown more cynical in the last couple of months.

I say that because at one point in time, I probably would have given this movie some mild props. To be sure, I still will – some of the special effects were quite solid – but I think that, in the past, I would have been more forgiving. Now, though, I can honestly say I thought that 95% of this film was utter trash.

To be fair, zombie movies have never been my biggest interest. Plenty are quite good, such as 28 Days Later…, Dawn of the Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, and Zombi 2, but it’s never been a subgenre that really turned me on.

That said, I can appreciate plenty of zombie films, but there’s also quite a lot of them that are abysmal, and I think The Rage is a good example of that. Some of this disdain comes from the fact I find the story absolutely terrible, and some comes from how terrible some of the CGI is, but no matter from whence my displeasure arises, I just know it’s there.

I won’t spend too long on the good, naturally. Like I said, some of the special effects are decent. There’s a mangled corpse of a little girl, and I appreciated that they had the guts to show that (as I can imagine plenty of bigger-budget movies wouldn’t have wanted to offend people’s sensibilities). Of course, said girl was mangled by hideous CGI birds, but more on that shortly.

The fact is, about half the special effects here are commendable. It’s very rarely the case, though, that good special effects make up for a failure in every other department. I don’t want to say it’s impossible – I can’t honestly say I’ve never given a movie a decent review solely because of the special effects – but it’s far from common, as I find the plot of a film much more important.

Naturally, that’s where the problem comes from. Elements of the story are interesting – Andrew Divoff’s character has a background that could have lent to a decently fun zombie movie. There’s an element here of trying to destroy the capitalist system of the USA, and as a socialist myself, I love the idea of destroying capitalistic systems. Not only that, but shots are also taken at the pharmaceutical companies and for-profit medical industry, which is all fair (as I 100% believe that, if the cure for cancer was found, those industries would do all that they could to suppress the information).

None of those elements, though, make up for how terrible the story generally is. It’s possible that, if they went in a more solidly comedic route, maybe some of this could have worked. Comedic elements are present during the last thirty minutes (much of it coming from some dwarf character), but it seems that it’s largely played straight with some campy performances (such as Andrew Divoff’s), and I don’t think it does the movie any wonders.

On that note, I don’t think any of the performances were great. Actually, I’d say the best performance in the film was Reggie Bannister (Phantasm, The Mangler Reborn), and he only really gets one scene, so that’s all the more disappointing. To be fair, Anthony Clark wasn’t bad either, but he wasn’t exactly what I’d call inspired. Ryan Hooks and Rachel Scheer were more on the generic end than anything else.

Sadly, most of the focus is on Erin Brown, Andrew Divoff, and Sean Serino. On Divoff (best known for Wishmaster), I can say that I’ve enjoyed him in the past, and I’m not averse to his hammy acting, but I just didn’t care for it in this movie. Erin Brown (Lust in the Mummy’s Tomb, Splatter Beach, Lust for Dracula, Cannibal Doctor, Satan’s School for Lust, An Erotic Werewolf in London, Holocaust Cannibal, Strip Club Massacre) isn’t at much fault here, but I wasn’t wowed by much of what she brought. Sean Serino (The Dead Matter) was given some really bad pieces of dialogue to play with (“Is God punishing us?!”), but she probably did what she could.

Another thing I have to mention – the CGI vultures were shit. There was a lot of bad CGI toward the finale, such as fire and blood (and no, nothing as grand as GRRM), but those vultures were the worst things I’ve seen since Birdemic, and I’m not much exaggerating. Just atrocious.

The plain fact here, though, is that I didn’t have fun during this. Some of the locations looked nice – apparently this was filmed entirely in my neighboring state of Ohio – and some story elements had potential, but overall, I found this a pretty terrible time. I imagine some people could get a kick out of it. Mushroomhead popped up a little toward the beginning, so maybe that’s enough to pull some people over. For me, though, I found this a struggle.

3.5/10