I came home on my birthday after a fun day to find a bunch of birthday cards from my relatives and a package from Entertainment One in my mailbox. I haven’t requested anything from Entertainment One recently to review, so I figured what was inside would be another pleasant surprise for my birthday. I was wrong.
Very wrong.
When I opened the package I uncovered Eaters, another one of Entertainment One’s zombie movies (I reviewed Osombie and War of the Dead, both zombie movies from Entertainment One). I like zombie movies as much as the next guy, but right at the top of the generic zombie cover it says “Presented by Uwe Boll.” If that name doesn’t scare you, it should. Boll is vilified by movie fans for creating one awful movie after another, including horrible movie adaptations of popular video games (such as In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and Bloodrayne).
So a word of advice to Entertainment One’s marketing department: While something like “Presented by Martin Scorsese” or “Presented by Quentin Tarantino” might help sell a movie, “Presented by Uwe Boll” is something that is not a selling point. It would be like putting “Made from Ground-Up Discarded Bits of Various Animals!” on a package of store brand hot dogs.
Still, since Entertainment One sent Eaters to me I figured the least I could do was watch it. However, after doing so I should have just told Entertainment One that it was lost in the mail if they ever asked what I thought of it.
Because for one thing, Eaters is not just a low-budget zombie film, it’s a horribly dubbed Italian low-budget zombie film. I don’t know how dubbing has gotten worse since the poor dubbing of 1960s spaghetti westerns, but somehow it has (it doesn’t help that the dubbers are clearly bored with their jobs and turn in awful performances). However, I think I would have preferred it to have been in Italian so I wouldn’t have been able to understand it. After all, I had to go through dialogue like this:
“You know the joke about the two ducks?”
“There’s nothing funny about fucking ducks.”
“You know the one about the two trucker drivers?”
“There’s nothing funny about fucking truck drivers either.”
This dialogue exchange from Eaters sums up the entire movie. The rest of the dialogue is like it was written by ten year old boys who just learned how to curse. As for the plot, Eaters follows just about every zombie convention you’d expect. The movie begins with a montage of newscasts depicting the growing zombie threat until we’re in a bunker with Alen (Guglielmo Favilla) and Igor (Alex Lucchesi), two zombie hunters who…
Oh man, I just can’t go any further with this. Al you need to know is that Eaters is truly one of the most awful movies I’ve seen on each and every level. The acting is horrible (the awful dubbing and dialogue makes it impossible for anyone to turn in a good performance), the story is a generic “humans versus armies of zombies” story with special effects that aren’t even as believable as the effects in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. It’s not even in “so bad it’s good territory,” because even the parts you’d expect to be unintentionally funny — like Igor’s ever-present growl that sounds like he spent his pre-zombie killing years as a death metal singer — aren’t funny enough to make it worth a watch just to poke fun at it. What scares me the most about the film is not the zombie gore, but the fact that it was directed by two people — Luca Boni and Marco Ristori (Ristori also co-wrote the script). That means that every bad decision made while making this was given the thumb’s up by another person, which means more than one person must have been convinced they were making a good movie.
Don’t see Eaters, even if you can’t get enough zombie movies — watch Walking Dead re-runs, or one of the much better above-mentioned Entertainment One zombie movies (I recommend Osombie, which has grown on me).
The Disc
The disc does have the movie’s original Italian soundtrack and English subtitles, which is definitely a better way to watch it than the dubbed version (but it’s not really an improvement). There is also a 33 minute making of feature that is hilariously edited with crunching guitars and plenty of explosion sound effects. Watching it made me feel bad, because the filmmakers are clearly enthusiastic about the project — unfortunately, their enthusiasm is misplaced. However, I can’t believe that the final film was based on the TENTH version of the script, with one of the screenwriters saying “we took out a lot of the stupid things.” Just how awful was the first draft?
Movie Rating: As far as bad horror movies goes, this is among the worst of the worst (1/10).
Disc Rating: A surprisingly thorough “Making Of” feature for such a low budget film (3/10).
Eaters will be released on DVD on March 5 from Entertainment One.
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