Tsunambee (2015, dir: Milko Davis & Thomas
Martwick; cast: Stacy Pederson, Ruselis Aumeen Perry,
Shale Le Page, Maria DeCoste, Theo Saccoliti)
Tsunambee
(2015) is a painfully boring, no-budget depiction of the
Apocalypse. Well, not really no-budget. The IMDb has
this film's budget at $780,000, but I don't see it
onscreen. I've seen better horror films -- more
entertaining and boasting superior talent -- shot in the
$10,000 to $15,000 range. Maybe the producers lied when
they claimed they spent $780,000 on it?
Tsunambee seems to be a SyFy Channel
wannabe. Giant killer bees. It's dumb as any SyFy Channel
movie, but without the entertainment value.
A group of disparate people -- white
rednecks, black gangstas, lady sheriff, little Christian
girl -- are thrown together during the Apocalypse. It's
not much of an Apocalypse. It's mostly giant CGI bees
flying around. There are a few earthquakes, which is
mostly the camera shaking, plus a crack in the ground, and
cracks in a ceiling. And a few zombies. After the bees
bite you, you turn into a zombie. But the zombies have
little screen time. It's mostly bees. And talking.
Talking, and talking, and TALKING.
Blah, blah, blah.
The characters go on, and on, and on,
discussing their past lives, their thoughts and feelings,
their situation, their plans to survive, etc. They also
bicker pointlessly, this being the writer's poor attempt
to inject more "drama" into the script.
Here's the main problem.
All that talking can be interesting and make for a good
horror film, but the characters must be engaging. Strong,
engaging characters require good writing and good acting.
Tsunambee has neither.
Characters are one-dimensional. The
cowardly redneck cries and blubbers throughout the film.
The hot-headed gangsta shouts and rages. The tough, smart
lady sheriff barks commands and rescues everyone time and
again. Etc.
The dialog is clichéd and vapid. The
lady sheriff and another woman exchange the story of their
lives. It's the obligatory scene when the characters "open
up" and explain why they became a sheriff, or why they're
with this or that person. The lady sheriff reveals that
she got interested in law enforcement because, as a little
girl, she liked the colored lights atop police cars.
Wow. Can this character be made any less
interesting?
Acting is also awful. Yeah, the
dialog is embarrassingly bad, but the actors do nothing to
breathe life into their lines. They sound like actors cold
reading a script they've just been handed.
These boring characters wander in the
desert, hide in a tunnel, drive about the desert, then
find refuge in a house with the bees outside. Sometimes
the bees attack while the characters run or hide. One
gangsta is stung and turns into a zombie, but is then
immediately killed. At one point, their car falls off a
cliff. I think that car drop might have eaten up most of
the film's budget.
There is some decent post-production
color correction, creating a gritty, desaturated look.
I'll give the filmmakers credit for that. I've seen uglier
films.
I've seen over a thousand horror
films and TV episodes. I'm pretty tolerant and will sit
through most crap. I know a film is really bad when I
start fast-forwarding through it. I sat through about half
of this film before I started fast-forwarding past scenes,
stopping on occasion, just to see how it all ended.
The ending was stupid, confusing, and
contradictory.
Oh yeah,
the film opens with a quote from Revelation,
but the film misspells it. The film spells it in plural
form -- Revelations. The correct form is singular.
"Communist Vampires" and
"CommunistVampires.com" trademarks are currently
unregistered, but pending registration upon need for
protection against improper use. The idea of marketing these
terms as a commodity is a protected idea under the Lanham
Act. 15 U.S.C. s 1114(1) (1994) (defining a trademark
infringement claim when the plaintiff has a registered
mark); 15 U.S.C. s 1125(a) (1994) (defining an action for
unfair competition in the context of trademark infringement
when the plaintiff holds an unregistered mark).