The Battery

A low budget movie about 2 baseball players traveling through zombie infested land. That is the basic concept of this feature. I found this movie to be very interesting but in my opinion it would have worked much better as a 25-30min long short flick. I see lot of good ideas bubbling under the surface but it's dragged on by way too many music scenes of those 2 main characters smoking, eating or just doing nothing. that is not the right way to add to the length of the movie. The music was OK :) I see a bright future for all involved, especially Jeremy Gardner. Overall it's well made budget movie. but this flick has too little flesh on the bones to justify the 100min running time.

The thought of yet another low-budget zombie movie filled me with dread, but I was hearing good word of mouth about Jeremy Gardner's $6000 zombie pic THE BATTERY, so I gave it a whirl at Amsterdam's Imagine film festival. And am very glad I did, as it turned out to be probably my favourite film of the all the ones I saw there.

It's a (nearly) 2-hander about two guys crossing rural New England and, very occasionally, fighting off zombies. The title is a baseball term referring to the partnership between the pitcher and the catcher. Or something - forgive if if I've got that wrong; I don't know much about baseball, but it doesn't matter anyway.

And that's pretty much all you need to know about the plot.

Like the best zombie films, it's more about the living than the dead. This is a double-pronged character/relationship study (which thankfully never degenerates into the bad soap of The Walking Dead) rather than an action movie and there isn't an awful lot of gore, so younger viewers with ADD might get fidgety. But anyone who enjoys a well-crafted screenplay and nicely-drawn characters will have a blast. The climax, which makes a virtue out of the film's low budget, is particularly ingenious.

There are no wobblicam, jitterbug editing, CCTV, found footage, flashy camera effects or modish colour grading. Just a brace of good performances against a backdrop of leafy green countryside in broad daylight, beautifully edited & classically filmed so that (and this is a novelty these days) you can actually SEE what's going on.

Also has an excellent soundtrack.

Ben (Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) survived the zombie apocalypse with a little luck and lots of patience inside a house surrounded by the undead. Now they travel around in the country with a simple strategy to survive: keep moving, so they can't catch us, and stay away from the towns and cities where most of them are lurking.

You might divide Zombie movies into 3 types: stage 1, when zombies only occur on remote islands, while the rest of the world doesn't notice ('White Zombie', 'I Walked With A Zombie', or Lucio Fulci's 'Zombi 2'). Stage 2, when a city is overrun, but with the aid of military forces, mankind may still emerge victorious ('Return of the Living Dead', Lenzi's 'Nightmare City'). Stage 3, when the zombies won and only few survivors are hiding or running ('Day of the Dead', 'Resident Evil: Extinction'). The problem is, too many 'stage 3' movies have been shot in recent years, including the TV series 'The Walking Dead' which took the commercial potential to a whole new level. So, if you pushed apocalypse to the top already, where can you go from there? 'The Battery' aka 'Ben & Mickey vs. the Dead' recognized you cannot push destruction and violence any further, so it takes apocalypse from a huge scale down to a small personal level. Ben and Mickey don't massacre the undead. They just try to stay out of the way and live a life with small pleasures. They'll be happy to find a toothbrush, clean socks, batteries for the CD player or a bottle of booze. The lack of heroic ambition and the wish to avoid fights leads to a lazy life (with the risk of an early demise, nonetheless). If viewers describe the movie as boring, slow or uneventful, that's because the two main characters love to live as uneventful as possible. The orchard, where nobody could pick up the apples because they are all dead, is a quiet and ultimately disturbing symbol for the decay of the world – you don't need to show a burning city for the same statement. The movie is kind of unique in its modesty - and very tongue-in-cheek, too. In my opinion, it deserves to be watched because it takes a different approach to the zombie genre, which is hard to achieve in a genre that accumulated so much attention of movie makers in recent years.

Sweet baby Jesus in a handbasket, you may just die of boredom before this movie ends. Painfully bad... still watched to the end, it IS a zombie movie but that's where its positives begin and end.

In fact, this just may be the first zombie movie I've ever deleted. This film takes everything that could possibly be crap about a movie and stuffs it into an interminably long focus on a catcher stuck in the friendzone as his pitcher mate hankers after anything with breasts.... notable scenes include pitcher masturbating in car as zombie girl crushes bloodied knockers against the window. A game of catch. Rolling Landscapes. A game of catch. Rolling forest. A game of catch. Rolling landscape. A quick game of catch followed by a quarter hour study of the interior headlining of a Volvo. Exciting stuff. Oh dear.... never again.

At last a good zombie flick. Since a long time now. Since 2007 and the rebirth of the zombie genre with 28 WEEKS LATER - a terrific experience as a viewer - we found legion of not only zombies but zombie movies, and not necessarily the best ones. Most of them worth the garbage can. I love this kind of small production, made among pals for six thousand bucks, with a total freedom, and without f...executive to watch every move you make, evaluate how much toilet paper you bring to the men's room. All those jerks who know sh...about movie production, who hardly know how a set is made and who only watch the dol register. Those clerk pricks. Yes, I like this little feature, but I agree with another viewer, it could have been shorter, for instance seventy minutes. It would have been far enough. Sure, the character study is OK. Well done for such a tiny budget. A good little gem.