From top to bottom this is a thorough disaster of a film. The plot is so diluted into teenybopper PG-13 musiak that it is a wonder why they bothered to keep the name "Pulse" in the first place. It takes cues from the original but botches them time and time again. The camerawork is a mess--shooting everything through a blue filter doesn't make your movie moody, it makes it look like crap. The editing is so bad it makes you wonder if they pieced it together on Windows Movie Maker. The acting is subpar, but with material this shoddy you can't expect great performances, and it is a shame too because I like Kristen Bell--she should have had the foresight to avoid this deformed monster but she probably just wanted the paycheck for a Persian Rug or something.

Diluted, derivative, dismal, and a few other negative d-words are the best way to explain this movie a movie that completely missed the message so completely that it is a wonder why they bothered to make it in the first place. We all know why--money--but I still want to hope in a very naive way that Hollywood still wants to make art rather than a quick buck.

The rest of the movie, that is original, is the producer playing some kind of psychologist. Tiffany's (remember Tiffany, that pop star from the 80s? Yeah, that Tiffany) choreographer is the woman plagued by weird dreams of a mirror in a house, and I swear she is one half of the Swiss experimental music duo Yello in fully cowboy attire playing the homeowner wandering about the tiny little ranch house looking hopelessly lost.

I want to give this zero stars, but it is so utterly bizarre that I have to give it a half just because I feel sorry for it. This is early 90s direct to video, which really meant something back then, unlike now where 90 percent of all horror movies are direct to video and some of them are rather good. It is shot on a handheld camera and looks like total hell. It pretty much lacks in all departments of filmmaking from sound, to editing, to writing, to continuity (watch for the scene with the woman in the bath and count the number of times the cold cream on her face vanishes only to reappear a second later).

This is a real train wreck of a movie, but for fans of garbage cinema (guilty, why do you think I am watching this in the first place?) it is a torturous little oddity.

Zombie movies are a Anti-Globalization rally. We don't give two rats' asses about your political views. We want gore, a couple of boobs, and violent zombie killing action. As much as I respect and admire the George Romero Living Dead Trilogy (I consider both "Land Of..." and "Diary Of..." not part of the series, we will see what comes of "Survival Of The Dead" if we consider it part of the hallowed group or not) for their political message and themes, they were expertly woven into the story itself and weren't the sole purpose behind the film--something every subsequent zombie-with-a-message movie totally forgets. Ideally for the low budget filmmaker, the goal should be Lucio Fulci's "Zombi", it is perfection in the cheap gore-drenched thrills department and is a much safer bet for those without the writing skills to deliver a message without boxing gloves.

That being said, the makers of "Zombies Anonymous" completely ignored my statement. In fact they went the opposite road and made the entire movie one long lecture on how we treat illegal immigrants. No zombie killing, no boobs, no apocalypse scenario. It is talky, dull, and stuck with its head hopelessly up its own ass. The one-star I've granted the film is due to the few brief moments of gore which, compared to the rest of the subpar filmmaking on display here, were actually decent, which proves to me they knew how to make a low budget gore flick but decided to go with the terrible dialogue and amateur acting route, making the movie an even bigger disappointment.

Unless you are in the mood for being lectured to ad nauseum on how you live in a terrible society because we make illegals mop our floors, I'd recommend skipping this and watching Lucio Fulci's "Zombi" while hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. It will hurt less and you'll get to watch a decent zombie movie in between the blinding flashes of pain.

This is the kind of movie made by the guys at the local comic book shop that, while they have seen more movies than me, have nary a clue how to actually make one. The movie has no pacing, lurching from set piece to set piece, including a rip-off of the gimp scene from "Pulp Fiction", throwing in random characters when it suits them.

There are good ideas to be found here and there, but the acting hammers them flat. Only half of the main character team has even the slightest flicker of acting ability; the other blows most of his lines, which is a shame because they decided to give him most of the "funny" dialogue and he is the main character, turning the movie into a grind of community theatre hell.

I usually give more credit to obviously garage-budget movies, but this one frustrated, annoyed, and aggravated me by simply trying to be like "Clerks" with zombies way too much. If you really love "Clerks" and wanted to know what if would be like with more inane dialogue but with even worse acting and zombies, werewolves, and vampires, I can't recommend this, but you might want to check it out simply for masochistic interest.

Oh how wrong I was.

The movie tries to cover ground between the first four "Friday The 13th" movies and in so doing feels incredibly rushed. Even worse, the deaths in this movie are spectacularly boring. One of the hallmarks of "Friday The 13th" is it creative kills, that is what brings the fans back time and again, but with two exceptions the kills in this movie are tired, boring, get it over with kinds of kills.

The characters are blah, but they aren't supposed to be anything but cannon fodder. In addition to being blah, the attempt at telling the Jason origin story in this one is so horribly botched it felt like the actor just winged it with no idea who Jason even was. Aside from the hockey mask, they pretty much screwed up everything in this movie. I'm just happy they didn't "reimagine" Jason into a football helmet.

Michael Bay is proving to be the kryptonite of horror movies. He showed the most amazing ability to suck the life out of what should have been an easy homerun with this movie.

One of the bigger questions I was left with at the end of the movie was why Jason was a giant pot farmer. One of the main plot devices in the movie is the massive field of pot that brings in the first group of sexy teens to be slaughtered. At first I just thought it was just an accident--Jason doesn't strike me as having a real green thumb--but later he kills the greasy hick because he was making off with the pot. Is this how Jason keeps himself in hockey masks and machetes? I can just see it now with the "reimagining" of "A Nightmare On Elm Street" (that is going to be a disaster, I fear): they explain Freddy's burns by saying he got them when his meth lab exploded.

My biggest problem was the characters, pure and simple. You spend the first 45 minutes of the movie stuck with two characters who are so utterly obnoxious that, not only do you lose any sympathy with them, eventually I wound up with a rather grim opinion that what happens to them in the third act deserved to happen to them. When that happens you lose all the horror because you no longer care about the characters and it becomes just an exposition of special effects, like it is some kind of industrial film showing you what the special effects makers can do for you if you wanted to make your own torture porn movie. The special effects are nice, but after 15+ years of watching horror movies you really can't wow me with just that. "Audition" gives you characters you not only sympathize with but care about, and then what happens is all the more terrifying because of the emotional investment.

An utter failure as a film, like all torture porn movies it fails to realize you can't just take the coward's way out and give us crappy characters whom the audience at best is annoyed by and at worst depises. It doesn't matter how much blood and gore you throw at a movie if the characters and by extension the plot is dreadful.

The movie has one very creepy scene when the two (or one--not sure if the girl counts as a main character, seeing as she vanishes halfway through and her boyfriend or whatever he is never seems to give a rip) go to their friend's home to see if she is okay and she really isn't. That one scene is really effective. Unfortunately, from there is devolves into a screed against religion--my best guess is Scientology, the controversial 'relgion' d'jeur.

A host of cameos--my favorite two being Tiffany Shepis and George Wendt, two very strong genre reliables--can't salvage this movie from the mire of mediocrity that it sinks into. I'm not exactly a huge fan of these "Reality" Horror movies, because while I understand their purpose in personalizing the horror by making it first person, I believe it does the opposite and dilutes the horror rather than intensifies it by taking the audience away and replacing them with the character with the camera--he's the voyeur of danger rather than the audience. A decent if not original idea (a horror movie about religion? Please the Italians did it more sacrilegious and better in the '70s with all those Nunsplotation films) that becomes more statement than film. If you must make a statement, weave it into the story like "Night of the Living Dead". Don't drop it on top of the story like a two ton Acme brand anvil.

The title is misleading. These movies look like they were made last week, and unless I'm mistaken it's been, oh, twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. So the "Soviet Underground" title is rather misleading. Aficionados of mix-tapes and other collections of the bizarre will recognize parts of "Shameless And Tasteless", which feature the crazy old lady who laughs just like you'd expect the witch in a Brothers Grimm tale to laugh.

Aside from a couple of fairly silly ideas--Killer Bra being chief among them--the bulk of this is obnoxious and annoying, which are the two chief characteristics of a Troma movie in my opinion. If you like Troma movies, then you will find a lot in common in these movies. If you can't stand them, don't blame me if you hate this strange clump of junk.

Everything that is wrong with "City Of Rott" is done doubly, so in this movie, to start with, it's still 60 minutes too long. After the first twenty, the movie has overstayed its welcome. You have a host of terrible characters: the girl sounds like Alvin of "Alvin And The Chipmunks" during his drag queen phase, and everybody else sounds like the same guy trying to pretend to be three different people and failing. The script is horrid. They call it a parody in a cheap attempt to hide the fact that every line makes you groan in either disbelief that somebody thinks this is funny or that you can't possibly believe somebody wasted money to make this. The animation is cheap as ever, and is embarrassing considering some of the Flash animation I've seen on the Internet that was done for nothing. The gore is back, and the gore really is the only thing that keeps this from being a zero-star movie, so you can guess that A) I'm a gorehound and B) it's a lotta' gore.

This is another in the seemingly endless horde of zombie movies that all share a very similar flaw: a couple of decent ideas that the filmmakers think they can stretch into 90 minutes, which they never can. The budget is too small for it to work effectively, the acting is subpar for even a low budget zombie movie, and the leaps of logic completely derail the movie before it gets a chance to leave the station. The most distracting thing about the entire movie is how utterly unimpressed the people are about the zombies. They spend their time tooling around their apartments that have lights, running water, pretty much everything you normally expect, but there are zombies outside which really makes it hard to believe this is the end of the world. The acting is sloppy, the characters aren't at all worried about the zombies--I've seen people freak out and throw-up during a decent thunderstorm and yet everyone here is as laid back as can be, which really destroys any illusion that this really is the zombie apocalypse.

There are a couple of good ideas here, but those two good ideas account for about ten minutes of the 87-minute runtime; the rest is just plain awful. Another mindless addition to the already bloated zombie movie horde, and this one really needs a bullet in its head.

This movie is almost 45 minutes too long, made up of scenes of people yelling at each other. Everybody in the movie is a walking, talking cliché--especially Marsha Gay Harden, who is supposed to be the real villain of the movie, not the tentacled rambling bug creatures, which, like another vastly overpraised movie, "Cloverfield", you really only see once. The movie fails by having too many characters, wasting too much time on giving each character his five minutes to ramble on and on, and by delivering its message in heavy one-two blows like you're in the ring with Mike Tyson.

The ending is a real corker, which I think I ruined by laughing at the absurdity of it. This isn't Darabont's "Shawshank" or "Green Mile", this is a second rate monster movie that gets lost in its own mist of a tirade against organized religion brainwashing everyone.

First off it loses points simply for hopping on the awful bandwagon of first person horror (or whatever the devil you call a horror movie where the camera is part of the movie). I can't stand these kind of movies. The monumental hurdle you have to clear in order to make it believable that people would be stupid enough to drag a running video camera through the apocalypse is incredibly difficult. The only one of these movies I found believable and at all enjoyable start to finish was "[Rec]", but the rest never seem able to come to terms with this.

This movie at least tries, by putting the cameras in the hands of hopeless over-pretentious film students; but in that we find another flaw. The movie is mired in characters that are hopelessly pretentious and the voiceovers are the height of unbearable.

Another problem is that message that the movie drives home like railroad spikes. In earlier Romero "Dead" films, the message was woven into the story--social changes, consumerism, and the military were part of the story but not the driving force. With "Land Of The Dead", and especially this one, it beats you over the head with its message. It felt always overpowering and almost ham-fisted.

I am the biggest fan of the first three "Dead" movies, and it might be the reason I disliked this movie so. I expected a higher calibre of film from George Romero. Instead I got a low grade zombie movie that like so many other zombie movies these days is getting lost among gimmicks.

If there is to be a 6th "Dead" movie, I think the best bet is to return to what works: a straightforward movie about likeable people under attack by hordes of the shambling dead. No more Speedy Gonzales zombies, no more first-person camera nonsense, just simple zombies and gore done right.

It starts off really well: a ridiculous over the top attempt to kill Jason, complete with airstrike (I can just imagine the FBI going to the air force and saying, "Look, we need to borrow a fully loaded fighter so we can blow up this one guy"), but then it starts to slip where Jason's heart is the real evil and if you eat his heart you become Jason. It is a really half-assed attempt to explain why Jason keeps coming back. But then it has a great sexy-teens-getting-killed moment that makes you think, "Okay, we're back to the good old Jason ways"; but no, now we have Jason, or the evil slug of Jason jumping from body to body trying to get to a blood relative. It is a very poor attempt at jump-starting the franchise by busily stealing from every other franchise out there from "Halloween" to "Terminator". It tries to be something new by doing things everyone else has already done. There are a few funny moments. The diner and all its Jason specialties is really amusing, but there aren't enough amusing little bits to paper over the long unbearable sections.

This movie does divide horror fans. On the one side you have "Friday The 13th" fans who hate this movie because, well, aside from the kockey mask this movie isn't a "Friday The 13th" movie, instead it is a shoddy jumble of every other horror franchise. But on the other hand you have people who dislike the "Friday The 13th" series who applaud it for trying to break the mold. I'm in the first camp. When I watch a "Friday The 13th" movie I want a "Friday The 13th" movie for all its cliches, machetes, naked teens, and gore, not a jumble of half-baked ideas that don't add up to a good movie in the end.