Plaguers (2008)

Here's one for us who loves the eighties. Or at least the monster-movies from this special era of our time. Plaguers is a retro-style Alien-clone but with alien-zombie instead of just... an alien! It's shot with a very low budget, a pale Steve Railsback and a couple of busty ladies doing what they do best, and that's not acting! A spaceship get's a distress-signal from a smaller vessel and of course they stop and find four women in short dresses who claimed that they where attacked by space-pirates! But they have a secret of their own... 

Well, except these mysterious ladies there's something even worse on our heroes ship: a ball of alien-energy! Or something like that. It glows green anyway and sure enough, it's dangerous! It start to spread some kinda weird alien-zombie-virus on the ship and turns dead people alive, alive people to dead-alive people and people who are dead-alive into... MONSTERS! At first they reminds us of the creatures in Lamberto Bavas two Demons-movies, but after a while they just mutate anymore and look like big pieces of... walking meat. 

I guess it's easy to make fun of Plaguers, but the truth is that it's a wellmade budget-movie that looks far better than a lot of other DTV-stuff that's coming out. I've seen Brad Sykes first movie, Camp Blood, and it was terrible. One of the worst indie-flicks I've ever seen. Since then he made alot of movies. Since 1999 this is his 19th movie and now it looks great! Brad is the man and I'm looking forward to more stuff from this guy. The movie has a retro-look, as I mentioned above. It looks like it was made twenty years ago and it looks fab. Even the graphics on the ships computer has that high-tech eighties-feeling, which today of course is quite primitive. The set's look beautiful and we get that old-school feeling direct, without being silly or camp. 

So, over to the horror-stuff: the acting. Haha, no... it's good acting, most of the time. Steve Railsback look a bit stiff and tired, but one the other side he's playing a android or something. That wasn't a spoiler, if you've seen any of these movies you could have guessed it from the first frame he was in. The guy, Bobby James, playing Mason is the best actor and Alexis Zibolis do a convincing job as the leading lady. But I can't really say anything bad about the others. They do it good, or at least what to expect from them. 

So, over to the REAL horror-stuff: the gore, splatter and monster! This is good! It's cheap but cool and gory. The make-up look nice and it's a lot of slime and blood covering the nice latex-applications. Like in Demons these creatures are aggressive, violent and very animalistic. They also have a tendency to kill people, and while it's not as much as I hope for, it's still a couple of great and bloody gore-effects. 

Plaguers is out on dvd in Hong Kong, so it's easy to buy at DDDhouse. If you don't want to wait for a US or European release of course...