Deadlands 2: Trapped

You know the drill. It's a small town somewhere in the U.S. One day, folks start acting crazy. People who look … dead perhaps … start attacking people. All attempts to fight them off fail. It's almost as if they were zombies or something.

That's right … it's another zombie film. All your standard bases are covered here. There's a government agency quarantining the town. They, of course, cannot successfully fight off the zombies, mostly because they keep forgetting to shoot them in the head. We have a group of survivors, some of whom know each other, some who are strangers, who lock themselves in an enclosed space (a movie theatre) to get away from the zombies. One of them has already been bitten by a zombie … I wonder what will happen to him? As you've probably surmised, this film is a by-the-numbers zombie flick. It's so by-the-numbers that it hits all the broad plot points without bothering to fill in the details. We see an unspecified government agency performing experiments that cause the zombie outbreak, but we never find out what this experiment is or how it might cause people to become zombies. We get no details about how this outbreak occurs. We see nobody become zombies. We don't know how people become zombies. Zombies just appear out of nowhere as needed in whatever size crowd the movie requires.

Essentially, it's impossible to have much of a stake in what happens in this movie. With the exception of one creative plot twist during a climactic action sequence, you've seen all of this before and you've seen it done much better. At best, it's a mildly inoffensive time waster.

The United States Government has developed a highly effective nerve gas that is unleashed upon the residents of a small Maryland City.

During the top secret exercise the infected citizens begin to convert each resident into a sort of living zombie, until the remaining town residents, 6 total strangers, are trapped inside a movie theater cineplex.

Direct to video taped on video and horribly acted. There is not plot at all. Tests go awry and people are suddenly zombies. Nothing new. Except that nearly half the movie is over before you see a zombie. And idiotically, when a gazillion zombies are rioting, an army guy actually repeatedly says "I got the shot. I got the shot." Uh, it would be hard to miss -- there are so many!

It's really a bad movie

The residents of a small Maryland town find themselves stuck in a movie theater after the military conducts a test on a new virus that turns the residents into flesh-hungry zombies, forcing them to find a way out before being killed.

A decent low-budget zombie actioner, it does have some good stuff going for it in the sense of a claustrophobic space being used to good effect, some nifty action scenes with a swarm of the creatures running loose attacking at the same time, and there's some good enough gore to count among the pervasive amount of these types of zombie movies. However, it still suffers from several rather big flaws, in that the zombies look utterly terrible when we do get to see them since it's always so dark it's hard to make out anything with any certainty, the few glimpses are pretty terrible and not that innovative anyway, the zombie action is nice when it happens, but it's far too infrequent than what it should be and the finale is just plain terrible. Really needed work, but it's a decent enough film as is.

Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Nudity, an attempted rape and children-in-jeopardy

I have to say that I'm writing this solely because one of the very first reviews I ever did on IMDb was for this film's predecessor "Deadlands: The Rising" and it was an awful review. Seriously...it was terrible and I still stand by it. But redemption can be sweet (even if the person getting it doesn't care at all about the person giving it, as is surely the case here). Deadlands 2 is by no means a great movie, but it's certainly watchable and a HUGE step forward for the director. Yes, it's still a low budget zombie movie, but it's better in pretty much every aspect.

The plot is pretty straight forward for a zombie movie. Throw a few strangers into an enclosed space and watch them battle wits with the undead. A bit derivative, but it's leaps and bounds better than the last film. One pitfall avoided that many directors fall into that is avoided here is the desire to use tons of blood/gore. Don't get me wrong, I love gore. It's just that it can make a low budget film look cheap and cheesy. Hell, even the zombies looked 10 times better. In the last movie they were just regular folks with white grease paint on their faces and black around the eyes. Looking like rejects from a Misfits album cover is no way to make zombies.

All in all the movie is flawed and if you don't know it's a low budget flick you might be disappointed. I, however, was pleasantly surprised, knowing full well the horrors of the previous film (sorry guys, I still think it was just terrible).

Part 2 of a supposed trilogy (I don't believe the 3rd is out yet) Deadlands 2: Trapped is sequel in name only and is a separate unconnected zombie tale from the first movie.

It tells your standard zombie apocalypse tale about a group of survivors who hold up in a cinema when the undead masses appear.

Truth is the first movie wasn't very good, it was your pretty standard hyper low budget zombie film. It did however have a marginal amount of character and certainly wasn't the worst I've seen.

Deadlands 2 is on an even lower budget and lacks the character this time around. It's still not among the worst movie of it's ilk I've seen but it's really poor uninspired stuff. If you've seen a single zombie movie before then you've seen this.

To make matters worse the movie doesn't have an ending, it's one of those films where the credits suddenly hit you unexpectedly. Unless I missed something? What I didn't miss however was the background story that popped up every once in a while regarding the origins of the outbreak, that was certainly the highlight of the movie as these scenes were considerably better than everything else.

Liked the first movie? Then you might find a degree of enjoyment, but for average Joe zombie movie lover this will not appease.

The Good:

Zombies look better than the previous movie, just

The Bad:

Has no ending

Mediocre across the board