Dead Trigger is based off a first-person shooter game I've never played. In the near future, a virus has turned a huge portion of the population into zombies--not enough though for there to be enough infrastructure to have an evil corporation that wants to monopolize a possible cure. To get it, they send Dolph and his rag-tag group of zombie killers into a zone full of zombies to find the scientist who think figured it out. The only thing worse than dealing with zombies, is evil corporations, but we trust Dolph can handle it.
But can we? This is extremely low-budget, like Asylum pre-Sharknado, maybe even lower budget than that. Retrograde might be the closest Dolph film I've seen on this level, and there's something about him being in a movie of this quality that feels off. There are some other names, like Isiah Washington, Oleg Taktarov, and Autumn Reeser--also Dolph flick mainstay James Chalke--, but they--other than Chalke--feel just as out of place. From there, I think you run into the classic zombie movie dilemma: how do you keep the "zombies walk in, shoot zombies in the head, someone gets bit, repeat" cycle from becoming redundant? This movie thought the corporation would do it, but they weren't in it enough. They also tried to add in characters, but they didn't develop them enough either. It felt like any scene that didn't have Dolph didn't work, and any scene that had Dolph only worked because of him. I think this could be a fun Dolph Fest addition, for hardcore fans that haven't seen it before, but beyond that, there is so much more Dolph out there that's worth seeing instead.
This is the 50th tag for Dolph here at the DTVC, but I don't know if we can officially say he's the first member of the 50 Club yet, because one of those 50 tags was the Jean-Claude Van Damme film fest for my 400th post. That's okay, I have a lot more Dolph in the can after I watched a bunch for My Dolph Lundgren List on Letterboxd (https://letterboxd.com/dtvconnoisseur/list/my-dolph-lundgren-list/), so he'll get to a more official 50 soon. This one definitely falls in the lower half, just because it is so low-budget, and feels unremarkable. That 90 minutes was a long 90 minutes, longer than it needed to be for something that could have been fun.
I should clarify here that the fact that it's low-budget alone isn't enough for me to dislike this. I really enjoyed Clownado, and that probably had a lower budget than this. But that one felt like everyone was more on the same page. The other thing is, Todd Sheetz is a veteran director who knows how to manage that budget, whereas here we had two directors who had never done a full length film before. It would be interesting to see what a Todd Sheetz, or another schlock auteur like Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski could do with this; or Albert Pyun, a fellow member of the 40 Club with Dolph, I think he would've taken this script, made fun, compelling characters, and shot the thing in a way that, yes, we would've known it was still low-budget, but maybe that 90 minutes would've been more entertaining.
This movie also really borrows from Soldier Boyz, the Michael Dudikoff goof fest where he takes a group of juvenile delinquents into a war zone to help him on a mission. The rag tag group of kids thing is always hard to sell, but I feel like in 2017 one would have to know it didn't work with Soldier Boyz in 1995, and maybe consider a different tract. If they could've just made one character compelling enough to want to see them in a scene without Dolph, that would've helped. Maybe make one of them a ninja. Ninja's always help. Or Sasquatch. You could've replaced the whole rag tag group of kids with a ninja and Sasquatch, but played it straight, and it would've been a classic.
As I mentioned above, the zombie as a baddie can be difficult to work, but the genius of George A. Romero was that he made it look easy. I think this movie though shows how hard it is. How many times can our characters walk into a room, get attacked by zombies, kill them, and either almost get bitten, or have someone get bitten to thin out the cast? Romero did other things, like used unique locations, created people we cared about, and set an overall tone that made the whole thing compelling. I'm not saying I needed Dead Trigger to be that good, just a serviceable fun time, and it unfortunately couldn't even be that.
Time to wrap it up. I think this is a good one for Dolph completists, but with so much else out there Dolph-wise, there are a lot of other ones to check out first. It's a shame with such a great title and a nice, compact runtime.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5662550
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