Revelation 22:22 (2004)

Posted on Oct 20, 2004 under Horror |

Written, produced and directed by Jerry Orzel
Starring
- Gabriel Gonder
- Quinn Stefen
- Lawrence Benjamin
- Valerie Brokaw
- Russell Zill

You know, there are a lot of low-budget homemade zombie movies out there. (I know, I really oughtta give warning before I drop a bombshell like that on you.) If it puzzles you that there are so many, even compared to other genres of shot-on-video indie movie-making, think of it this way: They’re not just zombie movies, they’re George Romero fan films. “Ah-hah!” you say. It’s analogous to the oodles of Star Wars fan films out there; aficionados with filmmaking aspirations decide to play in the garden of the acknowledged master, half as a creative outlet and half as a tribute. And there are some pluses to making a Romero fan flick over a Star Wars one. For one thing, abandoned real estate and thrift-store clothes are a lot easier to come by than Tunisian exteriors and vacuformed Stormtrooper uniforms. And for another, if you accidentally end up making money on your zombie epic, you don’t have to fear the assault of a legion of Jedi lawyers.

All of which is my roundabout way of telling you that Revelation 22:22 retreads damned familiar territory. After all, the hallmarks of a Romero living dead film aren’t the zombies themselves; instead, it’s the pattern of confining a bunch of people and seeing how they figuratively start “eating” each other.

“Hey, babe, you ready for that date — WITH DEATH???”

This one starts out in sunny Florida, where officer Bob (Gabriel Gonder) is about to join his wife and baby on a well-deserved vacation. On the way out of town, he overhears the squadroom scuttlebutt about a posse of five armed jewel thieves who are hitting local jewelry stores. Of course, there’s no reason that that should turn out to be particularly meaningful to him… is there?

Meanwhile, Barry (Lawrence Benjamin) and Kim (Valerie Brokaw) are about to cross that great divide between significant others and fiances. On their way out of town to visit her folks and share the news, they stop to pick up their car from a mechanic who just oozes competence and trustworthiness.

And, as the third thread in the skein of our plot, the five jewel thieves (hey, how ’bout that!) hit a downtown jewelry store. But things go wrong, and only four of them make it out. Mostly to keep their headcount up to union minimums, they take a customer as hostage (Tracy Mahoney), knock her out, and stuff her in the trunk. Then they head out of town.

Whaddaya wanna bet all three cars are taking the same road?

“Listen, I’m telling you — with all the sparkly things in there, we’ll blend right in!”

First, Bob pulls over by an abandoned gas station (great location, by the way) to drain his main vein. Being the highly trained law enforcement professional he is, he manages to drop his keys down a storm drain. And while he’s trying to fish them out with a stick — a zombie attacks!

Now, here’s where I settle into my role as a pedantic film git. (”Goodie!” you say. “We’ve been waiting!”) We all knew going into this movie, from the title and such (and presumably from the box, when it gets distribution — mine’s a plain VHS screener), that there will be zombies. However, the first fifteen minutes are zombie-free. Not only that, but they’re zombie-vibe-free. You’ve got a cop, a crime gang, and a pair of hapless civilians. Sounds like a crime thriller more than a zombie flick, right? Not that those elements can’t work in a zombie movie, or most other kinds of horror movie. (In fact, throwing a gang of criminals up against a supernatural menace is a surprisingly common plot in low-budget horror, probably because it supplies you with victims for whom you won’t weep when they get offed.) But up until the zombie shows up, there’s nothing internal to the movie that makes it a zombie movie; it only starts being a zombie movie at that point. That preamble could have easily led to an alien grey showing up, or an immortal swordsman, or a cloned dinosaur, or a time-traveling gunslinger, or… I’m just saying, something earlier to bring the zombies into the movie, even if it’s just a “meanwhile” shot of a decomposing hand pushing its way through peat moss, would have helped the story be a zombie story even before the zombies show up.

I know, I know. I’m a born complainer and spoilsport. If it weren’t for my incredible singing voice (and the fact that I used the word “skein” in this review), I’d have no redeeming qualities at all. Where were we?

Naw, the cemetery is down the street. This is the senior retirement community.

Right. Bob. He knocks the zombie aside, pulls his gun, finds out that bullets have no effect, and smashes the corpse’s head in with a brick.

Meanwhile, Barry’s “repaired” car decides to break down, and they coast to a stop in front of the same abandoned gas station. (Makes you wonder why it was abandoned; it’s sure getting a lot of traffic today.) Barry sees Bob’s car and goes looking for him, while Kim stays in the car… ready to be surrounded by the living dead, who are popcorning out of the grounds of the fully-stocked cemetery not two hundred yards distant! Bob and Barry rescue her, and the three of them hole up in… a whacked-out drug den!

For me, this is the most inspired part of the whole movie. Apparently, between the time that the gas station unexplainably went under and the time the dead started rising (roughly twenty minutes ago), some local kids turned the inside into their own hidden cannabis parlor. While it adds nothing to the plot (except giving the characters access to some candles), the multi-colored graffiti and tie-dyed furniture certainly add to the visual interest of a locale in which we’re going to be spending an awful lot of time.

It doesn’t take long before the carload of empty-handed thieves comes cruising down the road. (That does it — I’m buying that gas station.) Because they’re too busy throwing around blame for how badly the heist went, they accidentally run over a couple of zombies in the road and break their Unspecified Plot-Convenient Engine Component practically in the parking lot. At Bob’s urging, they run through the growing zombie hordes and barricade themselves inside the Expand-O-Mind Room with the others.

Service station — OF THE DEAD!!!

Here’s the felonious roll call: There’s Simon (Quinn Stefen), the leader; Eric (Russell Zill), the generic white guy; Jake (Josue Clement), the collegiate black guy; and Randall (Mark Heimann), Simon’s autistic brother who can snap out into a killing frenzy at Simon’s command (thanks to a bizarre carnival hypnosis accident in his childhood — man, this is who the movie should have been about). So we now have seven people locked inside against the undead masses. What could happen next?

Look, I told you that this was a Romero fan film, so the course of the story from here is crystal clear: They argue! Bob and Simon are constantly in each other’s face, positioning for Alpha Male, with Barry, Jake, and Eric throwing their weight one way or another. Kim, you’ll notice, is entirely left out of this dynamic, and thus ends up doing little for most of the movie apart from occasional hysterics; her main role is to be the person that Barry can feel protective toward.

As with the original Night of the Living Dead, it soon becomes clear that if our living survivors spent half as much time fighting the dead as jockeying for social position within their impromptu hierarchy, they could easily save themselves. Where as Romero’s version contained subtle insights on race relations, male protectiveness toward females, and the impotence of suburban man, the interpersonal conflict here often comes across as nothing more than an extended pissing contest. Even the thieves, who have a dozen successful heists to their name, can’t get their act together long enough to escape from disorganized, shambling corpses. This becomes readily apparent when they belatedly remember Hostage Girl, still in the trunk of the car; their crack mission out to rescue her results in Randall getting killed and Eric receiving a nasty bite, mainly because nobody remembered that Simon had the keys and therefore shouldn’t be the one laying down covering fire from afar.

(A further indictment of our characters’ competence: When Hostage Girl is released from the trunk, she panics, kicks Bob’s ass — this is a trained law enforcement professional, I remind you — and runs off in the opposite direction from the gas station. I had given her up for dead, but half an hour later she comes knocking on the door of the Bad Trip Bachelor Pad for shelter, none the worse for wear.)

Helluva product placement, that is.

Then, just to extend things out to full feature length, we’ve got some bizarre little philosophical discussions popping up. Well, “bizarre” isn’t really the word, so much as “facile.” First Barry and Jake have an argument that degenerates into heady positions on race relations; when Barry says that Jake should give up the life of crime and go back to college to be a credit to his people, Jake replies with, “Oh,yeah? What about the white girl you’re marrying?” And later, everyone gets to put their two cents in about God, heaven, hell, and the Gaia theory, with Simon contributing smirking, simplistic nihilism. (At least his views are in character; when the topic turns to theology, it’s law-and-order Bob who surprisingly espouses strict Darwinism, while college boy Jake comes out for old-time religion.)

I suppose it won’t be too much of a spoiler to say that none of these characters will be showing up in Revelation 22:22, Part 2, and that it’s their own collective stupidity that does them all in. There’s not nearly as much of a moral to be drawn from this movie as from Romero’s work, but at least extreme idiocy is shown to be an impediment to survival.