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I truly expected better, but it was not bad for what it was. Low / No budget, mediocre acting, limited gore. Zombies (Biosyns or whatever) fighting amongst themselves, albeit laughingly, was a fresh and unique concept not too often seen in this genre, which scored some points.
On the negative side, it did seriously drag throughout middle.
It was good for one viewing, but now the disc serves as a nice beer coaster.
Let's dispense with a few things and talk about what was GOOD about "The Vanguard":
Cinematography: Even though this was a movie shot entirely on video, there were many great scenes wonderfully framed with amazing depth and great color and clarity.
Soundtrack: For being such a low budget feature, they had decent background music that was both eerie and mood establishing.
Zombies: Even though they ran like apes, had horribly drawn "veins" on their faces, there was something very unsettling with the all white contact lenses these actors wore.
Those are some of the things that made "The Vanguard" good. Now, what made it bad?
1. Shot entirely on video. Jeez, I hate that.
2. Loss of narrative. Halfway through the movie, the direction the plot was taking starting to zig zag. The problem with many first time directors is they try to tackle multiple narrative lines at the same time. Best if the director had only followed the story with Max and maybe the renegade soldier as they attempted to elude capture. The addition of the resistance characters and the other Muslim soldier at the end totally derailed the whole movie.
3. Low budget. Shot almost entirely in the woods with one scene shot in an abandoned ghost town. Shooting a movie about a global catastrophe and then filming the entire thing in the local woods looks very amatuerish. With dialog they attempted to expand the material (e.g., Resistance fighter discussing a battle over a convoy of 20 Oil Tankers), but that just adds additional narrative to a story that's already dragging.
4. Max's Sanctuary. What the Heck? Is that suppose to keep out hordes of the undead? The producers should have devoted another week to the building of Max's sanctuary in the woods, and added a few more fence stakes. I look at that defensive structure and can guess that it'd take only 3 seconds for determine zombies to overrun that little hovel.
5. Max. So...? Our main character is a beatnik with both human and biosyn characteristics? That about right? What's up with the black shirt and black pants? I keep waiting for him to whip out a pair of dark sunglasses, grab a cup of cappucino, and start reading his latest musings he wrote down in his big book of poetry. I really got the impression that the director was trying to capture a bit of "John Rambo" with his depiction of Max, but he really should have gotten someone a little more muscluar, tone and with actual physical ability. That might have made this movie rock even more. One last thing about Max. Near the beginning? When he's riding his bicycle? Is there anyone, ANYONE out there who thought he looked COOL doing this? I saw that and instantly thought that he was being chased by high school bullies.
5. Writers. Fire them all. They wrote a decent first 30 pages, but after that they must have gotten really high and then tried to write the rest of the movie. People. Don't get high and write bad movies. It doesn't help us and it doesn't help you.
...and there you have it. "The Vanguard" was somewhat watchable in it's first 30-45 minutes, but after that it devolved into a really undiscernable mish-mash of conflicting ideas that are next to impossible to follow. There are a few gory scenes; however, instead of going for realism, the producer/director decided to see if they could drag out the various kills. They did this by hooking pumps up to their vat of fake blood and gushing blood out of inflicted wounds for an inordinate amount of time. In the "Evil Dead" series this was an effective tool because they were going for laughs and an extreme version of death. In this film where everything else is played straight, these ludricous deaths seem just out of place. They really should have stuck to as much realism here as possible, and it looked like an amatuerish attempt to cover up the fact that they couldn't accomplish filming a realistic death scene.
All in all "The Vanguard" only gets a 3 out of 10 rating. Better luck next time!
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