Battle Of The Damned

Story: A contagion released in a test facility has turned everyone save a handful of survivors into zombie-like creatures. Major Max Gatling (Lundgren) and his group are recruited to perform a rescue operation, deep in this zombie territory, and try to make it out alive.

Review: Sometime in the future, Southeast Asia becomes a hotbed for pharma companies to go wild with drug experimentation, the laws be damned. After the zombie contagion spreads, an isolated city is ostensibly quarantined by gun-toting guards and the meat-craving zombie/cannibals are fenced in.

However, the daughter (Jude, played by Zanetti) of a wealthy individual is trapped in this dead city of the damned and so, Gatling is hired to give the guards the slip and go rescue her. And that's pretty much the basis for the movie. One of the first among many plot holes you will wonder about is how Gatling is a military rank despite clearly being a mercenary. Does he have a backstory?

That aside, the street battles are what this movie is all about, with various gunfights and gore being the mainstay of this movie's action. The post-apocalyptic vibe is unabashedly campy. But while these may just be the two best things about the movie, dodgy dialogues between Gatling and Jude (when he does eventually find her), dog the proceedings. You'll wish they'd stop the pretense of a script and just fired their guns and blown up more of the zombie/cannibals instead.

And there's another unexplained element - rather inexplicably, robots that look like they've been made by scientists who rummaged an electronics scrap yard. It turns out that they've been protecting the humans in the city. Gatling manages to get the bots to help him too. The special effects aren't a talking point and though Lundgren is no Stallone or Schwarzenegger, it is puzzling to see him in a questionable movie like this. On the positive side, the film is about as literal as it gets, which is Dolph Lundgren shooting things, zombies and robots along with a lot of randomness.