Film Review: Automaton Transfusion (2006)

Written and directed by Steven C. Miller, and starring Garrett Jones, Juliet Reeves, and William Howard Bowman.

"In the early 1970s, when everyone in America was worrying about what was going on in Vietnam, the United States Army was secretly developing a way to reanimate the dead. The hope was to have the dead fight instead of the living, but the experiments were shut down when the reanimated corpses were unable to control their hunger for human flesh. Thirty years later the army has decided to reopen the project. Grover City, because of its remote location, would be the home of their main testing facilities. Without warning the experiments go horribly wrong in Grover City and the dead are now on the rampage, eating everyone in sight. With the town overtaken by Zombies, a group of high school seniors take it upon themselves to fight back and find a cure for this deadly disease."

The original trailer for Automaton called itself: "The film that defines our culture." It was filmed in nine days and on around $30,000. And it shows. It's pretty terrible really. There are so many inconsistencies, such as zombies with super strength, and then some that can't knock down a door. As bad as the movie is, it was made by people who were probably film students and never took it too seriously. Which means goods things came about, because its thick layers of stupid shit are where the film succeeds.

I enjoyed the fact that they put almost every zombie movie cliché all into one movie: a group of four people - three guys and one girl, baseball bats, chainsaws, shotguns, parents turning and then attacking their kids, military experiments, holding up in a bar, holding up in a barn, holding up in a house in the woods, girls falling, jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, and a token black guy. The greatest scene? About thirty minutes in, a zombie punches through a pregnant girls stomach, pulls out the fetus, then eats it. If you're looking for a shitty B-horror movie to enjoy, this is the one for you. Just imagine that you and your friends made this in your hometown and you'll have more fun. Supposedly there is a sequel planned. The largest fault in the movie? It ends abruptly with a black screen and white text which reads...

Best quote: "To be continued..."