Battle of the Damned (2013)

This is one I've wanted to do since before I went on my unplanned hiatus, but it was not an easy find on streaming unless I wanted to pay to rent it, which, with all the Dolph I still had to do that I could get as part of my various subscription packages, it was hard to justify a rental. Then I found it on Hoopla and all bets were off. Let's see if it was worth the wait.

Battle of the Damned has Dolph as Max Gatling (very Lance Rockford of him), a mercenary who is hired with his team to go into a zombie zone and rescue the daughter of a major businessman. When Dolph gets there, his crew is killed, so he figures he's gotta get this mission done at the very least so the death of his team isn't in vain. But then when he finds the daughter (Melanie Zanetti), she shows him a group of survivors she lives with, led by a charismatic leader who probably isn't what he seems. When that leader tries to have him killed, Dolph is rescued by the daughter's boyfriend, and together they find a group of killer robots and come back to rescue the survivors. But will Dolph and the robots be enough?

I really enjoyed this one. It's a zombie film that plays it straight, but yet isn't afraid to have fun at the same time; and Dolph seems to be on the same page about that, which makes it all the better. The addition of the robots just adds to the fun factor and makes the whole thing work that much more. On top of that, I think the standard supporting cast in a zombie film with the standard tensions were all a bit above standard, which enhanced the film. This is just a fun Dolph flick.

We are now at 56 movies for Dolph on the site, and while this may not be a top ten or twenty, it's a pretty good one compared to his others. If you look at his IMDb bio, this is one of 5 films he had released in 2013, and it's really the only one I liked, the others being The Package, Legendary, Ambushed, and Blood of Redemption, all of which we've reviewed at some point. The thing is, while 2013 was a spate of movies I didn't care for except for this one, we were still in the glow of Dolph's great Expendables performance, and even though his part was diminished some in part 2, there was a sense that bigger things were coming for Dolph, that he was becoming a bigger force outside of just our DTV circles--the "Dolph-isance" that Mitch from the Video Vacuum talked about was starting. Watching this now in 2020, it's hard to go back and think of what this was back then, and who Dolph was back then, compared to now. I think though, out of all of his 2013 films, this one is the best representation of this modern Dolph that everyone is enjoying.

In 2013 the zombie flick was also a big deal, perhaps even bigger than sharks in terms of where the low-budget and DTV market was planting all of its money, and I remember seeing trailers for this back in 2013 and thinking "looks like Dolph is getting in on the zombie game too." I think it's easy to be cynical about zombie flicks, because often the filmmakers and/or distributors are cynical about their audiences when it comes to making them, especially at that time when they were trying to cash in on the Walking Dead craze. What I liked about this film--and perhaps why Dolph chose to be involved--is that it didn't have any of that cynical side to it. This respected its audience and wanted to deliver a fun time, and as a result it did what it set out to do. This is the 15th zombie film we've done on the site (one of which is another Dolph flick, Dead Trigger, which had Art Camacho as fight choreographer), and there was a point where I was kind of zombied out and left these alone, but if we can find more gems like these, I may come back to them.

The old adage is, never act with kids or animals, because they'll always upstage you. I tend to disagree on the kids part of that, because I'm generally not a fan of kids in adult movies; but I also think I may add a group to that, and that's robots. A great robot is tough to beat--just ask the cast of Lost in Space. These robots that Dolph befriends are another fantastic example. To some extent I cared more about them than some of the human characters in the film. What is it about robots that makes them so lovable? I'd love to see a sequel to this where Dolph and one of the robots opens their own private detective agency. How great would that be? (As an aside, I read on IMDb that director Christopher Hatton may have repurposed robots from a previous film he did, Robotropolis. I haven't seen that one yet, so I don't know if that's the case.)

I want to go back to Dolph for our last paragraph here. We're looking at 56 films for him, and considering I have a bunch in the can from when I did my Dolph list on Letterboxd, it's a matter of when not if we'll hit 60. At last count, I'm seeing 8 more we can review, plus two documentaries he's in that I want to cover here, so it's really a question of whether or not we hit 70 with him. We'll get into this more when he does hit 60, but it can't be understated just how much Dolph has meant to this site over the 1000+ posts we've done. At some point we're going to catch up with his output and we won't have any more of his films to post, and someone else, maybe Gary Daniels--maybe in the far future if we're still doing the DTVC Scott Adkins--will top his record, but even when that happens, and Dolph no longer has the title of most films on the site, his presence and what he's meant to the site will never be diminished.

And with that, it's time to wrap this up. As far as I know, Hoopla is the only way to stream this without paying to rent it here in the States. Hoopla is a really great deal, I discovered it when I was looking this film up on Letterboxd actually, and all you need to do is link your account to your local library card, and you can virtually "borrow" titles like these to stream on your devices for three days. I think with that in mind, that you can stream this for free in the States, that makes it a no-brainer.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2210463