Zombie Penitentiary
With just two spots available on an FBI training course six forensic undergrads are taken by boat to the former site of the Eerie penitentiary which had also been used as a test zone for biological experiments. But when the dead start to rise from their dumping ground and hunt the intruders on the island it stops being about winning one of the two slots and becomes about getting off the island alive.
For a while "13 Eerie" is kind of entertaining with this set up of ambitious forensic students on an island trying to prove themselves good enough to win one of the two slots in the FBI academy. Watching them measure the size of a maggot pulled from a rotting corpse to work out how long it may have been dumped in the boot of the car is shall we say insightful. Okay so it lacks the snap and style of CSI but the whole picking up of clues side of the movie is a pleasant distraction.
But then "13 Eerie" switches track when the dead start to rise up and it becomes all about these students and the couple of men running the test battling zombies to survive. At which point "13 Eerie" becomes little more than a series of zombie movie cliches and the intelligence which had been shown in the set up all but disappears. It's not that "13 Eerie" suddenly becomes terrible, just ordinary with nothing to make it stand out from the zombie movie crowd with even the make up of the rotting living dead being typical of the 70s and 80s. I suppose the violence and gore is there with close ups of people getting hurt and becoming a meal for one but even that ends up feeling routine.
What this all boils down to is that after a reasonable idea "13 Eerie" turns itself in to just a routine zombie movie with people trying to survive getting killed and eaten by the flesh eating living dead. It isn't that "13 Eerie" ends up a bad movie but after a semi entertaining set up the fact it then resorts to cliches makes it disappointing.
Tags: Zombie Movies
