- Directed by Neil Marshall
- Written by Charlotte Kirk, Neil Marshall
- Stars Charlotte Kirk, Jonathan Howard, Jamie Bamber
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 36 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0dMzHLB2K8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This one is a little hit and miss, with a strong lead capable of surviving some brutal action. There’s some creepiness and tension. The military aspects and procedures and accents had some issues that tended to take us out of the moment. It’s more entertaining than not, but it’s not stellar.
Synopsis
In April, 2017, the USAF deployed a MOAB bomb, the largest non-nuclear weapon in its arsenal. Official reports state the bomb was used to destroy a key insurgent stronghold in the area. Unofficially, something else may have happened. This is the story of what really happened… Credits roll.
Two days later, there are jets flying over Afghanistan, and Captain Kate Sinclair notices a missile launch beneath them. The two pilots are forced to eject. Her wingman is shot by insurgents, but Kate kills some of the baddies before they get her.
Kate sees the guys who shot down the plane pursuing her across the desert, so she ducks into an abandoned Soviet mine to hide. With the men closing in behind her, she climbs down a ladder into a deep abyss.
At the bottom of the shaft, she starts exploring the Soviet tunnels using her glow-stick. Kate finds a long-dead scientist in his lab. One of the Afghans finds a light switch and turns it on. There’s a firefight, and the lab gets shot up pretty badly, including those big tanks with bodies inside. What could happen?
Kate gets away by crawling through the drains. One of the Afghans remains behind and examines the creatures from the tubes. One of them isn’t dead, but soon the Afghan is. Very quickly, Kate’s the only one left alive. She climbs up and out of the bunker, and sees that the monster has done the same but she slams and locks the doors.
Kate’s soon picked up by some allied soldiers. She insists that they can’t stay here, but makes no effort to explain to the others. When she does finally say what happened, Major Finch doesn’t believe a word of her story– but he calls military intelligence to report it.
Sergeant Hook tells the story of the group’s past: they’re all losers and misfits. Kabir Rahimi, a captured insurgent, was there at the bunker as well, and he corroborates Kate’s story. Hook and some of the soldiers start listening. Meanwhile, down below, more of the creatures break out of their cells. When they bust the doors open.
Sergeant Oswald of the SAS arrives, and he expects trouble and plans to hang around. The monsters attack after nightfall. Between the night vision and the machine guns, several dozen alert soldiers can’t hit anything. Or maybe they do– these things don’t die easily.
One of the creatures attacks Kate— with his two long tongues. Rahini chops it to pieces with his sword. Major Finch kills one with his baseball bat, but guns don’t seem to do much. Everyone who’s still alive hides in a metal storage unit with the door locked behind them.
Rahini tells them all about a story about a fallen star before the Soviets came. Then the Soviets came up with these super-soldier monsters that eat their prey. After losing 46 villagers, it all suddenly stopped.
They all go outside in the morning, and all the bodies are missing. They do find one of the monster’s bodies. The doctor thinks sunlight burns it like a vampire. The doctor opens it up with a chainsaw and crowbar– they are tough! On the inside, they have human organs.
Major Finch wakes up and explains that military intelligence knew all about the site for decades. The Soviets found a way to integrate foreign DNA into a human host. Foreign as in aliens. The aliens found a crashed alien spaceship– that’s the reason why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the first place. Suddenly, the creature who was being operated upon jumps up. After a close-quarters fight, Finch sacrifices himself by charging the creature with a grenade in hand.
The half-dozen or so surviving soldiers and Rahini head toward the bunker to destroy the place. Hook falls into the pit. The whole gang goes down a defective elevator to rescue him. They get the call that Intelligence is coming in about twenty minutes to blow the whole site up with a bomb.
Kate and the soldiers go down into the lab and throw a switch which activates a portal to another world. Up above, more insurgents attack the lone soldier who is guarding the entrance.
In a way far too ridiculous to explain, the guy outside drives the Hummer into the pit, which then falls on the monsters and kills a bunch of them. Kate and Hook, the only survivors, zip up the elevator cable just in time to kill the insurgents.
Just then, the bomber flies over with one minute to spare. They drive away as fast as they can when the bomb goes off…
Commentary
Jamie Bamber sounds like a British Hillbilly. He needed a better voice coach for this part, as did most of the other actors. How long would a known kleptomaniac last in the Army, anyway? I doubt the military would have much patience for that sort of thing.
None of the soldiers act like soldiers, Captain Kate especially. The creatures are men in rubber suits with occasional special effects when their tongues shoot out. Not bad, but not especially impressive either.
This was the same director who did “The Descent(https://www.horrorguys.com/the-descent-2005/)”(https://www.horrorguys.com/the-descent-2005/(https://www.horrorguys.com/the-descent-2005/)) and there are some similarities– a strong female lead who wanders around in the dark tunnels and fights monsters. That much was decent, but pretty much everything above ground was fairly abysmal.