ApoKalypse (2025)

This was an indie screener request from the film's creator, Lutz Geiger, one I had intended to do back in August, so I feel horrible that I'm only getting to it now. Maybe that should be a New Year's resolution, stay caught up on indie screeners. Let's see if I can keep to it!

ApoKalypse is an animated feature that follows Apo (Chris Koehne), a young man trying to get his skateboarding accessory company off the ground with his friend Jamal (Raven Wong), while the two work at a burger joint in the mall called Buns of Steel. The problem is, it's the early 2020s, and while the COVID vaccine is available, a cadre of unserious Americans don't want to take it. That's where the mall's director, Mr. Degeneres (Andrew Helbig), finds a way to get more people to his dying mall: he pretends to be a health influencer who pushes rat poison as a cure for COVID, which causes all these unserious Americans to come to buy it. Unfortunately, one side effect is it turns the people who take it into zombies. Now Apo, Jamal, and Apo's friend Cho (Ao Mikazuri) from the Korean chicken spot in the mall, need to find a way to escape. Will they get out alive?

This movie gets a lot of stuff right, which is great, because we live in unserious times, especially here in the US, so watching something like this acts as a form of catharsis. Beyond the depiction of Karens and other MAGA types and how ridiculous they are, I also liked the depiction of Apo trying to find a way to make money in an economy that's increasingly more difficult for people his age. The other thing I appreciated was the animation softened the grossness of a lot of the stuff that happens, like when a pregnant zombie Karen kicks her baby out, and said baby is swung around by the umbilical cord to attack a fleeing patron, or when we get to the end and the mall is a pile of dead bodies, rotting zombies, and feces, it's a lot easier to take when it's all a series of drawings. There are some moments, especially early on, where scenes take a little longer than I'd have liked to develop, but the entire film clocks in at just over an hour, so none of it hurts too much. Especially after the year we just had, this might help you feel a little better, so it's worth checking out.

The concept of the Karen has grown in the age of social media and viral videos, to the point that content creators have turned to hiring actors to portray Karens in staged scenarios. What I liked here was Geiger was able to bring the concept of the Karen back to the racist elements that it was born from. It wasn't just about entitled upper- and middle-class white women asking to speak to the manager, it's about these specific women using the levers of society at their disposal to harm black and brown people, and that's what we see here, whether it's the Karen on the street trying to get Apo arrested for riding his skateboard, to the one at the burger joint trying to get Jamal fired for not giving her a free water. I think if you hear "zombie Karens" in 2025, you might think of the staged, viral version of that we see today, but that's not what we have in this movie, which I appreciated, and I think helped make this work.

Another area where the zombie metaphor worked for me is in this discussion around what people should do if they have these unserious, uncouth MAGA family members in their lives. It's fortunately not a discussion I've personally had to deal with, but when a close family member would rather eat horse paste than get a vaccine shot, or believes all of the ills of our society come from undocumented immigrants, trans people, and honestly teaching America's racist history in schools, there are no easy answers on how someone should approach that. Older generations have this idea that family relations are important no matter what, and everyone needs to agree to disagree; while younger generations are quicker to go no-contact and spend holidays with friends or alone instead of enduring uncomfortable family situations. That's where the zombie metaphor is best, because sometimes you just gotta get out and save yourself; but then later when Cho's parents are stranded in the mall, Cho convinces Apo to help her save them, because they're not racist zombies, they just give Cho a hard time. It's like, if they're full on zombified, you gotta get out of there; but if they're just a pain in the ass and don't have any abhorrent views, you can't just abandon them to the zombie apocalypse.

You may have noticed that Uwe Boll is tagged in this. He did the voice of the sleeping police officer in the mall, who sleeps through the entire mess, then wakes up and finds a finger in one of his donuts, which he proceeds to remove, lick the chocolate off of, and then toss aside. We haven't seen Boll on the site in almost 11 years, when we reviewed the third In the Name of the King movie. At that time we were close to our unplanned hiatus, we only had two more reviews after that until I came back in 2019, and Boll himself went on a hiatus himself in 2016. He was someone on track to be another Hall of Fame director, and looking at his bio, he has another 7 or 8 movies we could review, which would put him at 15 directed movies, more than enough to get him in. It might be something we look at going into the new year, especially since we're almost finished with Isaac Florentine's filmography, so we'll have open slots for other director posts.

Finally, one area that this film didn't get into as much, is the male equivalent to the Karen, the doughy guy in Ray-Bans with a late 90s goatee that probably wasn't in style when he had it back then, let alone 25 years later. Geiger opts for more militant types, thinner guys with shaved heads, which works, but I always think of that collage of profile pics where all those MAGA guys looked the same. And it is an interesting double standard, because while we have staged viral videos of actors pretending to be Karens, we don't have the same thing with actors playing those types of guys, even though here in South Philly I think you're more likely to see those guys than you are Karens. I'm not an actor, but being a bit on the doughy side myself, and being in my late 40s now, it is interesting to consider if a content creator in this area came to me to play the part of a MAGA guy in a staged confrontation with restaurant workers. I guess first off, if my day job found out they may not take it well, even if it was staged, but that aside, could I do it, especially if the money was good? First I'd need the goatee, which, when it was popular in the late 90s my facial hair hadn't matured enough for me to be able to do the mustache portion, let alone the connector to the goatee, so I've never had that look before. Add on the Ray-Bans for someone who never wears sunglasses, and I think I might scare myself, even before I put on the "These Colors Don't Run" shirt. I don't know what content creators pay for that kind of work--or if they provide their own Ray-Bans and "These Colors Don't Run" shirts, because I can't afford my own Ray-Bans, and without a car it's hard to get to the Shore to buy one of those ridiculous shirts--but if the number was good, maybe something in the four figures range, I could use that money to do some trips to see some ballparks I haven't been to before--again, assuming my day job never found out. I can see the Zoom call now, "hey Matt, what's with the goatee?" "Oh, you know... just trying something new out... you like it?" "Um... as long as you like it, Matt, that's what's important."

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently rent this for $2 on Prime. It's a fun way to support an indie creative, plus I think it's cathartic as well considering the year we just experienced. Lutz Geiger and company do a great job handling these issues, and the animated aspect makes the gross parts easier to manage, so it all worked for me.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27166284

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires (2018)

Recently I was a guest on the Exploding Helicopter podcast, and this was the film Will and I talked about. Not only does it have an exploding helicopter, but it's a send up of 80s cop-on-the-edge action films. Of course I was all in and ready to get after it.

Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires is a stop-motion animation film created by Mike Mort about the eponymous hero, a cop on the edge in the mid-80s, looking for revenge for the death of his lady at the hands of ninjas. When people in the city start turning up dead, they think they have a grizzly serial killer on the loose, but when an old man named Abraham Van Rental shows up with a stake and tries to kill one of the victims who escaped her killers, Steel learns that these killings are the work of "trampires," the dreaded hybrid of tramps and vampires. At the same time, the precinct psychiatrist's attempts to help the force get in touch with their feelings is rendering them ineffective at fighting crime. That means it's now it's up to Steel and Van Rental to find the source of the trampires and take them all down.

Overall this is a fun time. For the most part the jokes about 80s action land, and land in a particularly smart and endearing way that I think all action fans will appreciate. On the other hand, the jokes about Steel and other guys dressing like women are dated and hacky, especially for 2018, and some of the sexual jokes were a little too "that friend you know who doesn't know how to dial it down," which in a movie like this you usually want, but, again, seeing Van Rental getting screwed by a pig/vampire is a bit much--another analogy is the comedian who's dying and hopes excessive profanity and jokes about sex will save them. As bad as that could be, this movie is full of jokes, and the fact that more land than don't means this works for me, and I think for action fans it's worth checking out.

We've all seen a lot of 80s action send-ups, and some are just so over-the-top--Stallone-style--that I would get it if you were skeptical of another one, but what I really loved about this film was how well they nailed them, even when they were over-the-top. I think the animation aspect of it helped too, you can do that over-the-top thing with stop-motion characters, and the animation lends an element of unreality that allows it to get away with the unreality of the action world in a way that a live-action unreality action world spoof would look gratuitously over-the-top, which would cause us to roll our eyes at those, when those same moments in this film feel more endearing.

One of the questions Will asked me on the pod was who my favorite cops on the edge are. The two I pulled off the top of my head were John McClane from the Die Hard films, and C. Thomas Howell's Mark Goddard in The Sweeper. Some other great ones in my mind are John Matuszak in One Man Force, Fred Williamson in any number of films where he played a Chicago cop in the 80s and 90s, and Dolph Lundgren's Chris Kenner in Showndown in Little Tokyo. Outside of the hacky sexual jokes or jokes about Steel dressing like a woman, this movie creates a caricature of our favorite cops on the edge that does the concept justice--but at the same time, it exists solely for this animated world created Mike Mort--there's no actor who could play a live-action Steel and make it work the way he works here. It's a testament to how well-conceived and executed Mort's vision is that it works so well.

The "trampire" aspect of this shouldn't be lost in all the great 80s action send-up talk, because it was a fun take on vampires that I thought really worked. It also allowed the film to be classified as a horror film, which meant horror films sites picked it up--and much more than the action sites according to the IMDb critic reviews section. I think the reason for that is horror sites review anything horror-related, whereas I think many action sites--myself included, though I'm more action by default because I do like to cover other genres--would look at the idea of an 80s action animated spoof and think it can't be good. Either that, or it just hasn't crossed enough of our radars. I hadn't heard of it at all until Will asked if I wanted to discuss on his pod, and then when I watched it, I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before. The problem is, there's just too much Dolph, Van Damme, Rothrock, etc. out there that needs reviewing, plus tons of actual 80s action movies we haven't done yet that's now becoming more available. Maybe if Dolph had voiced one of the characters we'd have known about it sooner--actually I know we would've.

 
Finally, no 80s action spoof/send-up would be complete without a fantastic soundtrack, and this film definitely delivered on that. My personal favorite was a Vixen track, who I loved during the Hair Band era, as ten-year-old Matt had crushes on all of them. It was a reminder of another element we’re missing in the current DTV age, whether it’s the New Metal/“Wildfire in the Streets” 2010s period, to the modern remixed/drum machine age, beautiful Hair Metal and 80s/90s-era rock added a layer that enhanced otherwise unremarkable actioners, and without it the movies are, well, just unremarkable. Take Wilding. Sure, Wings Hauser is fantastic, and the plot idea is ridiculous, but the great soundtrack with a Pat Benetar-esque singer giving us “Don’t Try to Stop Tomorrow” just makes it that much better. The problem is, with modern DTV budgets being slashed, getting a band to record in a studio is often out, which is a loss for all of us. My advice to modern DTV studios: cut one star from the tin, and find a group of aging rockers to give you two hard-driving tracks and one ballad.

And with that, let’s wrap this up. This is currently available to rent on Amazon for a good price. I think it’s worth it as an action movie fan, this is a lot of fun, and it gets a lot of action movie elements right. And thanks again to Will for having me on the Exploding Helicopter podcast. If you’re not subscribed to it you should be!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4278346

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

Seal Team (2021)

It's April Fool's Day again, and in that spirit, I'm doing a post on something outside the norm for the site as more of a joke. The thing is here, while this is a joke post, it also gets Dolph Lundgren another tag, so even when we're not serious, he adds to his record-holding number at the DTVC.

Seal Team is about some seals off the coast of South Africa--which explains why they look more like American sea lions, but anyway--who need to find some fish, but the problem is the sharks in the water are preventing that. When rogue seal Quinn strikes out on his own, his friend Benji joins him, and subsequently gets eaten by a shark--perfect for a kids movie, right? Quinn wants he and his fellow seals to get out from under the fin of these scary sea monsters, so he enlists the aid of a walrus--or maybe he's a seal with a mustache?--named Claggart (JK Simmons), who used to be a part of a military program where he, another seal, and a dolphin (Dolph Lundgren) helped find and defuse bombs. Now he's going to train Quinn and some other seals so they can fight back against these scary sharks.

While I understand that I am in no way the target demographic for this film, after watching it I couldn't figure out who was. When the friend Benji is eaten by the shark, it happens off-screen, so I thought maybe he just disappeared and he'd come back at the end. Oh no, the shark ate him. Wait what? And this is for kids? As you can see above, Dolph's character smokes a cigar, which is great for us as adults, but again, smoking cigars in a kids movie? But it's not an adult movie either, the comedy is the crazy over-the-top (Stallone-style) kind that wouldn't work for an adult; yet it also tries to have things for adults like Seal--yes, the singer, Seal--whose hits would've been before a lot of the parents of the kids watching this listened to popular music, other than maybe the song from Batman Forever, so his inclusion would be for the older uncle like me who drew babysitting duty? Same with the "jump the shark" joke they made. The other interesting thing is it was made for the big screen, and on the small screen as a streamer on Netflix, the fast moving chases scenes and other action moments didn't translate as well, and I think also would've made it tougher for younger audiences to keep up. The thing is, this isn't horrible, it's not some kind of train wreck thing, it's just that tonally I don't know if it has a proper identity or knows who the target audience is.

We got another Dolph bait-and-switch here. Not as egregious as Ambushed, but the fact that Dolph was only doing voicework does make it particularly galling. He's in at the very beginning, and at the very end, and that's it--yet that was enough for him to get his own title card before the credits? When I first got wind of this, I knew I would have to watch it because it has Dolph, and considering it was direct to Netflix here in the States, I figured I'd need to review it as well, so April Fool's Day seemed like the best place to put it; but when I actually got stuck in on it, the reality set in that I was going to be watching a 100-minute cartoon that technically was supposed to be for kids. I'm not one of those types who's like "oh yeah, Finding Nemo has a lot of stuff for adults in it too!" My Dinner with Andre that I reviewed last year for April Fools is more my speed; but we have this mission that we've been on since we started the site to get all of Dolph's direct to video films--and even some theatrical films--reviewed on here, so here we are, in the interests trying to complete this thing we've started. As an aside, I really like old Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so it's not like I'm a total stick in the mud, but for whatever reason this new type of comedy in kids' cartoons doesn't work for me,

This was a South African production, and as such, I think there were some areas where culturally they didn't know where we are in the US in terms of certain language. The best example of this was the word "stupid." This is not only a word that's not used around kids anymore, but they're taught from a young age that it's not a nice thing to say. And this isn't a new thing, I remember when my nephew was between 3 and 5 in the late 2000s/early 2010s, he'd say "that person said the 'S' word." It doesn't mean it's censored out on popular media like say another "S" word, "shit," but no one making a movie for kids in America would use that word in their script, especially not as often as this film does. The thing is though, if you're not culturally up on that here in the States, you'd have no idea. It's another way though that this film doesn't make any sense, because I'm surprised Netflix, whose executives would be up on that, and probably are teaching their children not to call people "stupid," wouldn't have asked them to fix that if they wanted it available on their site as appropriate for kids. Maybe they didn't bother watching it first?

As I mentioned above, one of the seals is voiced by Seal, who performs on some kind of stage for other seals. I appreciated it as someone who likes his music, but part of me thought it was a reference that I'm not sure many people watching this would've gotten. On the other hand, parents are having kids older now, so there are more people my age that have kids in this target demo--if this is even the proper demo, because I don't know if I'd show this to a 7-year-old. To be too young to get the Seal reference would've put them as being born in the mid-to-late 80s, and I don't know how many people in that age group have kids that were born in the early 2010s. I think even some of those older Millennial parents may only remember "Kiss from a Rose" though, which was everywhere in 1995. I tried listening to it for this review, and couldn't, because I still had, as the Germans say, my nose full of it from when it was played twice an hour on every radio station almost 20 years ago. At least this movie, when it did use a Seal song, went with "Crazy," which wasn't as ubiquitous when it took off and gave me a nice sense of nostalgia.

Even as an April Fool's post, I wanted to give Dolph his second paragraph. This is now 71 films for him, which makes him 12 clear of Gary Daniels, who has the second-most films, but also, unlike Daniels, Dolph's recent output been more robust. Since 2021, Dolph has had 9 DTV flicks come out, compared to Daniels's 4, of which one, Law of Destiny, I can't find on streaming in the States. So not only will Dolph be number one all-time for the foreseeable future, but the margin between him and second place will probably grow, to the point that maybe no one catches him. On top of that, he's combining DTV efforts with big screen efforts like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Expend4bles, and his highest grossing film ever, Minions: The Rise of Gru. We could make the case that this is a cheap tag for Dolph, because he's only doing voice work, and his character is barely in it at all, but Daniels also has his share of tags for very small parts, like in Final Impact. Essentially it all works out and everyone gets the tags they should. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Netflix. I honestly don't know if this is good for kids. It's definitely not good for adults. That just leaves Dolph completists, and something like this would be for the highest level completists--and if you're at that level, this won't be an easy sit.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8456190

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.