Automaton Transfusion USA,
R, 75 m, 2006
Teenage potheads and the morally impaired might get off on
the grisly goings-on in Steven C. Miller’s backyard zombie flick, Automaton
Transfusion, but everyone else will be performing peristaltic pyrotechnics.
The film’s unremitting barrage of sickening effects becomes almost
mind-numbing; after a while, you stop doing the Technicolor yawn and just start
yawning. Automaton Transfusion (for those of you still puzzling over that
inelegant title, “automaton” can be used colloquially to describe a mindless
follower) is derivative fare; it tags on 28 Days Later and other classics
of the genre as slavishly as the living dead go after human flesh. Shot in nine
days (with, I’m told, a Panasonic AG-DVX100A) on a paltry budget of $30,000,
the picture was a labor of love for Miller, a twenty-something Full Sail
University graduate whose only prior directorial credit was Suffer or
Sacrifice, a crude half-reeler that won some sort of award at the Florida 48
Hour Film Project. (It’s a good place to learn speedy, guerilla-style
filmmaking techniques: contestants are given only two days to shoot, edit and
score a movie before it’s shown to an audience.) Automaton Transfusion
shows Miller and his ghoulish band to a have a pretty good grasp of the language
of cinema, but it strikes me as almost sinful to squander all that talent on
what is essentially a juvenile game of gross-out. (Hungry, young directors used
to have something to say.) And yet I must admit that many of the gory
effects—in spite of the filmmakers having a piddling budget to draw from—are
impressively done. The true star of Automaton Transfusion is make-up
artist Rick Gonzales, a very talented fellow who had me stumped as to how he
pulled off some of his ickier tricks. (No CGI short-cuts here; this is old
school stuff that would do Rob Bottin proud.) If the shredding of human tissue
is your thing, Automaton Transfusion is a veritable banquet, but those
with a delicate constitution (or some semblance of taste) will need to stay
clear. There’s as much blood and guts on display here as in Peter Jackson’s Dead
Alive (which had the same loony, over-the-top quality as Sam Raimi’s Evil
Dead trilogy), and there are scenes (such as the merciless evisceration of a
gang of zombies with a chainsaw) that seem directly inspired by Jackson’s
bloody opus. But Miller doesn’t have Jackson’s wit (well, at least the wit
Jackson used to display before he started making bloated, impersonal sword and
sorcery epics), and he can’t keep the bedlam interesting without pushing the
envelope to sadistic extremes. (Which is probably why the Weinstein Company
acquired the title for its DVD label, Dimension Extreme.) Automaton Transfusion crosses Shaun of the Dead
with Red Dawn and sets the resulting madness to a punk rock beat. When a
top-secret military experiment goes terribly awry, a group of nondescript high
school students find their town over run with undead cannibals. Lots of
blood-spattered action ensues as the kids try to take down the ravenous fiends.
And that’s about it. Most of this creepshow (which is shot handheld and very
tight) fades from memory quicker than an episode of “The Munsters,” but a
couple of effects stick in the mind (not a good thing, really): one of the
automatons rips a cheerleader’s face apart, while another seizes an unborn
baby from a young woman’s uterus and devours it. The latter goes beyond gross;
it is morally repugnant, and if Miller had had a lick of sense, he would’ve
removed it from the final cut. The inclusion of that bit (which is played for
laughs) takes what is otherwise an inconsequential creature feature and turns it
into a grindhouse obscenity that all God-fearing souls are duty-bound to
censure. While checking out almost twenty-five other reviews for Automaton
Transfusion on the Net, I couldn’t find one critic with the strength of
character to take the film to task for its forced abortion scene. Quite the
opposite, in fact: they all had things to say like, “cool,” “gnarly” and
“never seen that one before.” (Of course, most of these dunderheads referred
to the baby as a “fetus,” an old trick the pro-choice crowd uses to keep us
from thinking of a bun in the oven as a human being worthy of constitutional
protection.) There was a time when horror films honored an unspoken rule that
forbade the monster from going after the elderly, the handicapped, cute ‘n’
cuddly animals, babies, and even babies born to parents living in Berkeley, CA
(and if the law wasn’t observed, at least the killing wasn’t depicted in
excessively horrid detail), but now it appears that anything goes. (Aftermath,
anyone?) Over the last month, I’ve seen at least three genre pictures that
feature the slaying of a pregnant woman: Inside, The Lost, and now
this crazy thing. (Let me get this straight: Juno was criticized in some
sick circles for having a pro-life message, while Automaton Transfusion
is lauded for its subversiveness? Perhaps Michael Savage is on to something:
Liberalism is a mental disorder.) What’s also disturbing is that Miller
was able to shoot much of this movie’s action in an actual Lutheran high
school. As someone who was raised Lutheran, I can attest to the fact that it’s
pretty laid-back denomination, but c’mon! I highly doubt Jesus would give his
blessing to this gruesome item. May 9, 2008 “Automaton Transfusion” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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