Project Terrible: THE VANGUARD

Woot woot, PROJECT TERRIBLE IS BACK!!! It's the 7th round and this time it's SIX sick movie-sadomasochists who torture each other with terrible (or not so terrible) crap. 

Huge thanks to Robert from Gaming Creatively who completely failed to torment me with this British post-apocalyptic movie. I already regret that I gave him the stupid teenie-crap "The Initiation Of Sarah (2006)" :)

THE VANGUARD

UK, 2008
Director: Matthew Hope

6/10

The general reception of "The Vanguard" has been very negative: there are loads of low ratings and very bad reviews all over the internet. However, for some reason I pretty much enjoyed it.

 It may have something to do with the fact that I have seen a few similarly low-budgeted post-apocalyptic movies in the last weeks ("Vanguard" reminded me a bit of Doug Roos' "The Sky Has Fallen"), or simply because I didn't expect this to be terrible, because the trailers and the cover artwork look great.

Matthew Hope's directorial feature-length debut isn't perfect, but it's a fairly decent and cool-looking end-of-the-world-movie with weird characters, bleak settings, zombies and shit. The story is a mess and doesn't make much sense, but it's told in a pretty unique and original diary-like way.

With 1-2 exceptions, the acting is pretty top notch, most notably Ray Bullock Jr. as deaf badass Max who knows how to hack and slash zombies to shreds with only 2 hatchets. The zombie make-up looks eerie and interesting, and there's lots of awesome blood spraying.

Best of all: the fantastic score which consists of tremendous tribals and beautiful Oriental melodies, all the atmospheric landscapes and abandoned locations, all the eyegasmic colours and the absolutely stunning cinematography.

Worst of all: the pacing (the last third is so slow and tedious, I almost fell asleep), the lame performance of Steve Weston and the awful, AWFUL CGI gore scene at the end.

Final verdict: nice movie, far from being terrible.

Imdb