Le dernier soldat

Dolph Lungren stars in yet another straight to DVD action film. This time he plays a former military man recruited by a wealthy guy to go somewhere dangerous and extract his daughter. So yeah basically the same plot as a couple of hundred other action flicks.

The twist is the "Dangerous area" is full of zombies, and on top of that military grade robots are also out in force.

With a hostile reception from all sides upon his arrival Lungren must dig deep to find and rescue the girl.

It's dumb, it looks shoddy and despite the zombies vs robots thing which is remotely original the whole thing feels oddly familiar.

For fans of Lungren or hardcore zombie nuts only.

The Good:

Lungren still looks the part

Kind of original

The Bad:

Crappy zombies

SFX more miss than hit

Weak kills

Seven shades of dumb

There was some sketchy dialog particularly noticeable when Dolph's character max was speaking with his fellow soldier while they were walking on the bridge early in the movie, and some of the acting was stilted, but I loved that the zombies moved quickly and the robots were fun. The Dolphster is getting old, you could tell by his movements, especially when he runs, but he is in excellent shape. Dolph plays the part of the stoic unwilling hero well. The CGI was not Lucas film quality but it was not distracting. The main characters had clear personalities and weren't all generic. I only wish the end wasn't so predictable as to who would survive.

This movie does what I have always wished zombie movies would do. Make the men fighting the zombies competent but not superhuman. The "good guys" shoot with accuracy and don't waste ammo. They also don't just stand still and let the zombies eat them - they fight like their lives depend on it! When they do die the soldiers/mercs die because even though they fought well they were simply over run by superior numbers not because of total complete incompetence which is the standard for 99% of zombie flicks.

Most movies like this have some sort of special forces or organized shock troops that go into battle against the zombies and then just slowly take random unaimed volleys into the zombie crowds with little or no effect and then die pointlessly- their entire lives full of training and discipline completely forgotten and unused- VERY unrealistic. This movie doesn't do that- it is the complete 180 degree opposite and makes you like the characters and want them to live! Fun movie for action and sci-fi fans.

After a zombie outbreak in Asia, the mercenary Major Max Gatling (Dolph Lundgren) is hired by a wealthy industrialist that was the responsible for the pandemic to rescue his daughter Jude (Melanie Zanetti) with his team from a city. Max loses his group that is killed by the zombies and stays alone to accomplish his assignment. He finds Jude and learns that there are other survivors; Duke (David Field), Reese (Matt Doran), Elvis (Jen Sung), Lynn (Lydia Look) and Anna (Oda Maria). She refuses to flee alone without the others and Duke and Elvis handcuff Max on a power pole to die. However, when Reese discovers that Jude is pregnant and the city will be firebombed, he rescues Max to save Jude. Then they find a group of robots killing zombies and Max reprograms them to help the survivors to escape. Will the group succeed to escape?

"Battle of the Damned" is a laughable movie with Dolph Lundgren in the lead role. The idea of zombies and robots is original but the execution is very poor: terrible screenplay and dialogs are terrible; and the camera work in the mayhem of zombies is awful. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Zumbis e Robôs" ("Zombies and Robots")

A contagious virus escapes from a research facility turning people into flesh eating killers. The city is quarantined and a soldier and his team are hired to rescue his daughter.

Christopher Hatton writes and directs this low budget science fiction romp that fuses two sub-genre subjects, the modern zombie-infected and Robots. Coincidently it shares the same basic concept as Zombie Massacre (2013) and elements from a lesser known zombie film Severed: Forest of the Dead (2005).

Shaky camera shots aside it's a b-film that has atmosphere thanks to the unusual Malaysian location and interesting architecture. The generic costume design fittingly works, the music by Joe Ng and Ting Si Hao although borrowing from many sci-fi films is excellent. The violence is aplenty, with the gun and abundance of knife play being effective enough.

There's no small Dolph Lundgren cameo it's very much is his film focusing on his Max Gatling character throughout. Both actresses Oda Maria as Anna and Melanie Zanetti as Jude are notable with the rest of the cast being adequate given Hatton's limited script. The zombies sadly are not the slow shambling kind and the robot CGI effects are a mixed bag. Nevertheless, the relationship between both the main robot (voiced by Tim Cooper) and Max is quiet interesting and humorous. Beneath the low end production there is quite a good story even if it swaps development, depth and pacing for action.

Don't expect too much, Hatton has a lot on his hands juggling all the high concept elements coherently and keeps it linear but what is on offer is the infected, robots and soldier high-jinks and basically that's what it delivers.