2009
Robert David Sanders
Robert David Sanders
It’s an unusually warm Christmas Eve in LA and various apartment
dwellers are: getting together for a
party, trying to have sex, or being agoraphobic. Their petty squabbles and interpersonal
relationships are interrupted by a series of tremors that grow stronger with
each passing one. The apartment loses
power after a particularly strong quake, and at the cost of a couple of kids,
the residents discover monstrous things are crawling out of a newly formed
fissure in the basement and they are working their way up through the complex. The
surviving residents must find a way to the roof before the monsters find them.
The acting is pretty weak, the sets on the cheap side, and the
monsters a bit rubbery, but “The Blackout” is still extremely ambitious for its
tiny budget. The monsters are mix of
practical suits and GGI to varying levels of success, although I do like their
design quite a bit. The human characters are a lot less interesting. I did like
that neither we nor the characters ever have a good idea where these creatures
come from or what they really want (other than to eat us, of course). I also
really appreciated the apocalyptic final imagery that really opens up the story
from the contained space of the apartment building. If you have a high tolerance (or perhaps even
a love) of micro-budget monster movies, you could do a lot worse than spend
some of your Christmas vacation with this one.
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