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After the joy of rewatching Overlord last night, I am back on the dog shit trail. Or am I? Daylights End, 2016, After a plague turns a huge section of humanity into bloodthirsty creatures, a drifter finds few survivors and reluctantly decides to help them. And this is one of those movies pushed by Amazon. It is there in the list when looking at Romero or Zombieland. Daylights End. It feels like a vampire title. Apparently its not.

It stars Johnny Strong. Now I have attempted to watch this a half dozen times, maybe more. But it is Strongs firm jawed model looks that turn me off it. Now it does have Lance Henrikson, but he’ll do anything for a sack of change. And Strong, after looking him up, was one of the sniper spec ops guys who sacrificed themselves in Black Hawk Down. So for that alone I need to give it a fair shake of the stick.

There are many movies like this one. A bad episode of the walking dead It is formulaic. A macho hero, probably emotionally detached, rolls into town and is the saviour before eventually leaving and going his own way. Actually that is the plot of the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV show and the Littlest Hobo. A tonne of westerns. When it comes to zombie movies and movies we have seen this one felt a bit of a mishmash, a mashup of zombie hunter, Navy Seals vs Zombies, The Last Hope, Rise of the Zombies, Amityville Uprising, Zombie Warz with a z. We have an overly macho hero Thomas Rourke killing zombies because they turned his wife and he ended up killing her. This was actually done by an alpha that is following Thomas, but somehow Thomas is following it? I didn’t get that, it was there days before he arrived. That one is different. It watches. Ok. A well armed group of former police officers led by Lance Henkrison and a lot of civilians they have sworn to protect. Hard nosed Henrikson and Thomas don’t agree. Cops that are trained and armed by taken to task my a bunch of marauders until Thomas wipes the lot of them out in one go?

Thomas was too macho. And they gave him the gun from Black Hawk Down. In fact Strong uses the Black Hawk Down photo as his headshot. He was invincible and refused to be wrong, even when his foolhardy mission, the only way we can get everyone to the plane, ends up killing everyone he went with and let the infected into the police station, killing even more.

For people who had surviving for so long they didn’t last very long as soon as Thomas arrived. I guess the lesson is don’t listen to the know it all handsome macho guy who has been doing everything solo since the virus started.

Henrikson was underused. Louis Mandylor was the best thing about this movie. Not a lot happened. He saves Sam and goes back to the station. They put him in a cell. They are attacked. He escapes and is then allowed to stay out. He goes on a foolhardy mission. He beats bad guy in the softest of ways. He leaves.

The sunlight thing was more of a vamp thing.

It was watchable but poor. A bit better than the aforementioned crop of bad macho hero movies and cop movies… so I would give it… 4.5/10 worth a meh. But don’t feel bad if you turn it off. Def not worth paying cash money for.

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JJ Abrams' Bad Robot brings us this underrated WW2 super soldier zombie movie from 2018. And I had been putting off watching it for the pod as I had until I appeared on BPs Let's Talk Horror Channel the other night. BP is watching and reviewing movies this year that he believes aren't getting the credit they deserve. He and I talked Cooties, but he also talked Overlord and it prompted me to watch it today.

You can watch BPs episode on Overlord here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQEzZswm3_k&t=9s

Ok. So for me this was a decent WW2 movie, akin to Band of Brothers, and Saving Private Ryan. It was made well, with an excellent cast, superb look, feel and effects. The zombie super soldier element really doesn't appear until an hour in. Until then this is a group of US paratroopers in occupied France planning to take out a German radio tower to enable D-Day to go ahead.

From when Iain de Caestecker is killed by the Nazi commander and then injected by Jovan Adepo's Boyce, the movie changes. It still have the sabotage element, but now we have something new, something out of Project Wolf Hunter.

Whilst the super soldier thing isn't new, having seen it in Valley of the Dead, Frankenstein's Army, Output 1 to 3, recently Operation Undead, The Revenant, Army of the Dead and the aforementioned Project Wolf Hunter, this was a decent war movie with the super soldier thing added. I guess that is why I didn't watch it for the pod... until now, and the intervention, or inspiration from Let's Talk Horror Channel.

It is a solid 6.5 for me, 6.6 on IMDB, and 82% on RT. So, if you haven't seen it, and don't mind the WW2 plot and story for a third of it, then give it a go.

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And onto resident evil extinction, part 3 of the franchise that we are working our way through. We will watch the movies, then Welcome to Racoon City the reboot and the Netflix show. But before that, this is the 3rd movie on the bounce and it admittedly my favourite, and think that is because it is no longer hamstrung by being tied to the games, and therefore has to play to the audience of gamers. It can just be a movie

It opens as the first movie does with Alice in the shower waking up after the EMP wiped her and James Purefoys memory. However this is not Alice it is one of many clones created by the evil Dr Issacs. Which is a good thing as she ends up getting killed, but only after the res dress boots, photo, and laser corridor of the first movie, along with a lot of her clone sisters. What a waste of a good Alice. Nasty ditch full of alices.

This is an umbrella lab under a tiny shack in the middle of the Mojave desert, surrounded by zombies in the thousands.

So the t-virus got out, and took out the world. It is no longer limited to Racoon City. Within weeks the USA is gone, within months the world. And lakes rivers and seas dried out… which is cool for this movie, but in the later ones, the ones with the planes and aircraft carrier etc it is a fertile looking green Canada.

I like this one, it is brain candy along the lines of Paul Bettany's Priest and Carl Urban's Dredd. It is a fun movie, but it doesn't need to be a Resident Evil movie as we end up with super telekenetic Alice. It is now removed from the games, and this is, as Michael says, part of an Alice v Wesker and Umbrella, as it the rest of the Milla Jovovic series.

6.5/10 as it is a fun apocalyptic jaunt in the desert.